DBMS > Blazegraph vs. Cassandra vs. RDF4J vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Blazegraph vs. Cassandra vs. RDF4J vs. Virtuoso

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Amazon has acquired Blazegraph's domain and (probably) product. It is said that Amazon Neptune is based on Blazegraph.

Description

High-performance graph database supporting Semantic Web (RDF/SPARQL) and Graph Database (tinkerpop3, blueprints, vertex-centric) APIs with scale-out and High Availability.

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Wide column store

RDF store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.77
Rank	#222	Overall
	#20	Graph DBMS
	#8	RDF stores

Score	103.86
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.71
Rank	#231	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	4.20
Rank	#83	Overall
	#14	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#45	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

blazegraph.com

cassandra.apache.org

rdf4j.org

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

wiki.blazegraph.com

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Blazegraph

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2006

2008

2004

1998

Current release

2.1.5, March 2019

4.1.3, July 2023

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

extended commercial license available

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

Implementation language

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

RDF literal 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

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SPARQL is used as query language

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
SPARQL QUERY
SPARQL UPDATE
TinkerPop 3

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
PHP
Python

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

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

Security and Authentication via Web Application Container (Tomcat, Jetty)

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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