DBMS > Amazon Neptune vs. HEAVY.AI vs. OpenSearch vs. PostgreSQL vs. SurrealDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon Neptune vs. HEAVY.AI vs. OpenSearch vs. PostgreSQL vs. SurrealDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud

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

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

A fully ACID transactional, developer-friendly, multi-model DBMS

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Relational DBMS

Search engine
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Document store
Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	2.13
Rank	#111	Overall
	#9	Graph DBMS
	#5	RDF stores

Score	1.15
Rank	#167	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Score	17.38
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Search engines
	#2	Vector DBMS

Score	674.32
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	1.08
Rank	#176	Overall
	#30	Document stores
	#16	Graph DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/neptune

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

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

www.postgresql.org

surrealdb.com

Technical documentation

aws.amazon.com/neptune/developer-resources

docs.heavy.ai

opensearch.org/docs/latest

www.postgresql.org/docs

surrealdb.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

The OpenSearch Software Foundation

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

SurrealDB Ltd

Initial release

2017

2016

2021

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2022

Current release

5.10, January 2022

2.19, February 2025

16.4, August 2024

v1.5.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

BSD

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.

STACKIT OpenSearch offers OpenSearch in a managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant, for a wide range of applications like analytics, website search, offering scalability and fast data access.

PostgreSQL Flex @ STACKIT offers managed PostgreSQL Instances with adjustable CPU, RAM, storage amount and speed and several extensions available, in enterprise grade to perfectly match all application requirements. All 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

C++ and CUDA

Java

Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

schema-free

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

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

standard with numerous extensions

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

OpenCypher
RDF 1.1 / SPARQL 1.1
TinkerPop Gremlin

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

GraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

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

yes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

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

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.