DBMS > Amazon Neptune vs. Cassandra vs. Neo4j vs. PostGIS vs. SAP Adaptive Server

System Properties Comparison Amazon Neptune vs. Cassandra vs. Neo4j vs. PostGIS vs. SAP Adaptive Server

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

The SAP (Sybase) Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) is an enterprise-class RDBMS

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

with Boeing's Spatial Query Server

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	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	21.72
Rank	#29	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Score	35.09
Rank	#25	Overall
	#17	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/neptune

cassandra.apache.org

neo4j.com

postgis.net

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sybase-ase.html

Technical documentation

aws.amazon.com/neptune/developer-resources

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

neo4j.com/docs

postgis.net/documentation

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_ASE

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Neo4j, Inc.

SAP, Sybase

Initial release

2017

2008

2007

2005

1987

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.20, May 2024

3.4.2, February 2024

16.0

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

GPL v2.0

commercial

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.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

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

Implementation language

Java

Java, Scala

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

OpenCypher
RDF 1.1 / SPARQL 1.1
TinkerPop Gremlin

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Supported programming languages

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

C
C++
Cobol
Java
Java
Perl
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

Java and Transact-SQL

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes

based on PostgreSQL

horizontal partitioning

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.

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

based on PostgreSQL

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with encyption-at-rest

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

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 object

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

yes

based on PostgreSQL

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
» more

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

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
» more

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

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

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

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
» more

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

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