DBMS > Cassandra vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. YugabyteDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. YugabyteDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

High-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale applications. Wire and feature compatible with PostgreSQL.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Wide column store

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.91
Rank	#102	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

neo4j.com

www.yugabyte.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

neo4j.com/docs

docs.yugabyte.com
github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Yugabyte Inc.

Initial release

2008

1989

2007

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.19, April 2024

2.19, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

YugabyteDB Managed is the fully managed database-as-a-service offering of YugabyteDB. Get started quickly, and effortlessly ensure continuous availability and limitless scale of your cloud native applications.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Java, Scala

C and C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux

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

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

depending on used data model

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.

yes

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

yes, PostgreSQL compatible

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

JDBC
YCQL, an SQL-based flexible-schema API with its roots in Cassandra Query Language
YSQL - a fully relational SQL API that is wire compatible with the SQL language in PostgreSQL

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

sql, plpgsql, C

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Hash and Range Sharding, row-level geo-partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Based on Raft distributed consensus protocol, minimum 3 replicas for continuous availability

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

Immediate Consistency

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

Strong consistency on writes and tunable consistency on reads

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Distributed ACID with Serializable & Snapshot Isolation. Inspired by Google Spanner architecture.

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

based on RocksDB

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 can be defined per object

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

yes

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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YugabyteDB is an open source distributed SQL database for cloud native transactional...
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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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PostgreSQL compatible: Get instantly productive with a PostgreSQL compatible RDBMS....
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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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Systems of record and engagement for cloud native applications that require resilience,...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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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.
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Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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2 Million+ lifetime clusters deployed, 6.5K+ GitHub stars, 7K YugabyteDB Community...
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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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Apache 2.0 license for the database
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News

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