DBMS > Citus vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle Rdb vs. RocksDB

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle Rdb vs. RocksDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

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

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	1.14
Rank	#178	Overall
	#80	Relational DBMS

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Website

www.citusdata.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

neo4j.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb.html

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

neo4j.com/docs

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb-doc.html

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

Google

Neo4j, Inc.

Oracle, originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

2010

2017

2007

1984

2013

Current release

8.1, December 2018

5.20, May 2024

7.4.1.1, 2021

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

BSD

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

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Linux

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

HP Open VMS

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

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.

yes

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

yes, on a single node

yes

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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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