DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Neo4j vs. Realm

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Neo4j vs. Realm

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	20.56
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

neo4j.com

realm.io

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

neo4j.com/docs

realm.io/docs

Developer

Amazon

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Initial release

2012

2010

2016

2007

2014

Current release

5.19, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Implementation language

Erlang

C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C#
Java
PHP

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Transact SQL

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

via event handler

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

In-Memory realm

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
» more

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