DBMS > Amazon Neptune vs. Informix vs. Kinetica vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Amazon Neptune vs. Informix vs. Kinetica vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud

A secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Relational DBMS

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	2.20
Rank	#119	Overall
	#9	Graph DBMS
	#5	RDF stores

Score	17.87
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	0.64
Rank	#236	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/neptune

www.ibm.com/products/informix

www.kinetica.com

www.snowflake.com

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

aws.amazon.com/neptune/developer-resources

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

docs.kinetica.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Amazon

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

Kinetica

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2017

1984

2012

2014

Current release

14.10.FC5, November 2020

7.1, August 2021

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Implementation language

C, C++ and Java

C, C++

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

OpenCypher
RDF 1.1 / SPARQL 1.1
TinkerPop Gremlin

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

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
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

GPU vRAM or System RAM

User concepts

Access control

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

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

Access rights for users and roles on table level

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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