DBMS > Amazon Neptune vs. Amazon Redshift vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Lovefield vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison Amazon Neptune vs. Amazon Redshift vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Lovefield vs. Neo4j

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

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

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.29
Rank	#113	Overall
	#9	Graph DBMS
	#5	RDF stores

Score	16.88
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	0.33
Rank	#286	Overall
	#131	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/neptune

aws.amazon.com/redshift

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

google.github.io/lovefield

neo4j.com

Technical documentation

aws.amazon.com/neptune/developer-resources

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

docs.heavy.ai

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Google

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2017

2012

2016

2014

2007

Current release

5.10, January 2022

2.1.12, February 2017

5.20, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

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

C++ and CUDA

JavaScript

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

Linux

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

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

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

restricted

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

yes

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

APIs and other access methods

OpenCypher
RDF 1.1 / SPARQL 1.1
TinkerPop Gremlin

JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

JavaScript

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

Using read-only observers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Round robin

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-availability zones high availability, asynchronous replication for up to 15 read replicas within a single region. Global database clusters consists of a primary write DB cluster in one region, and up to five secondary read DB clusters in different regions. Each secondary region can have up to 16 reader instances.

yes

Multi-source replication

none

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with encyption-at-rest

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

using MemoryDB

User concepts

Access control

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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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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