DBMS > Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. Neo4j vs. Sqrrl

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. Neo4j vs. Sqrrl

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Sqrrl has been acquired by Amazon and became a part of Amazon Web Services. It has been removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

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

Adaptable, secure NoSQL built on Apache Accumulo

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.firebirdsql.org

neo4j.com

sqrrl.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Firebird Foundation

Neo4j, Inc.

Amazon

originally Sqrrl Data, Inc.

Initial release

2008

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2007

2012

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

5.19, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

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.

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

Java, Scala

Java

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

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

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

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.

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Accumulo Shell
Java API
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Actionscript
C

using GLib
C#
C++
Cocoa
Delphi
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

making use of Hadoop

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

selectable replication factor

making use of Hadoop

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

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

Immediate Consistency

Document store kept consistent with combination of global timestamping, row-level transactions, and server-side consistency resolution.

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Atomic updates per row, document, or graph entity

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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

Cell-level Security, Data-Centric Security, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
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