DBMS > Amazon Neptune vs. Couchbase vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Access vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison Amazon Neptune vs. Couchbase vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Access vs. Neo4j

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector 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	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/neptune

www.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

neo4j.com

Technical documentation

aws.amazon.com/neptune/developer-resources

docs.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/docs/database

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2017

2011

2012

1992

2007

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

5.20, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

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, C++, Go and Erlang

C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

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

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

APIs and other access methods

OpenCypher
RDF 1.1 / SPARQL 1.1
TinkerPop Gremlin

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Automatic Sharding

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.

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

none

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

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

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with encyption-at-rest

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

User concepts

Access control

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

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

yes, based on authentication and database rules

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

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

News

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1 June 2024

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22 May 2024

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