DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Graph Engine vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Neo4j vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Graph Engine vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Neo4j vs. TerarkDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

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

Score	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	0.61
Rank	#240	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#35	Key-value stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#60	Key-value stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.graphengine.io

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

neo4j.com

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

neo4j.com/docs

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2012

2010

2019

2007

2016

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

5.19, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

restricted open source version 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

.NET and C

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

.NET

hosted

Linux

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

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

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

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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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...
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Licensing and pricing models

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