DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. Apache Impala vs. Memcached vs. Neo4j vs. SAP HANA

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. Apache Impala vs. Memcached vs. Neo4j vs. SAP HANA

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted simple database service by Amazon, with the data stored in the Amazon Cloud.

There is an unrelated product called SimpleDB developed by Edward Sciore

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching

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

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.88
Rank	#133	Overall
	#23	Key-value stores

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	18.08
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	44.27
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

impala.apache.org

www.memcached.org

neo4j.com

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

neo4j.com/docs

help.sap.com/hana

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Neo4j, Inc.

SAP

Initial release

2007

2013

2003

2007

2010

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

1.6.27, May 2024

5.20, May 2024

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

BSD license

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

also available as a cloud based service

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++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux

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

Appliance or cloud-service

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All columns are indexed automatically

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Erlang
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
C
C++
ColdFusion
Erlang
Java
Lisp
Lua
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Sharding

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

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

Transaction concepts

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

Concurrent data updates can be detected by the application

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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)

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

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

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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