DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Kingbase vs. MariaDB vs. Neo4j vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Kingbase vs. MariaDB vs. Neo4j vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

An enterprise-class RDBMS compatible with PostgreSQL and Oracle and widely used in China.

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	0.50
Rank	#257	Overall
	#119	Relational DBMS

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

clickhouse.com

www.kingbase.com.cn

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

neo4j.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

neo4j.com/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

BeiJing KINGBASE Information technologies inc.

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Neo4j, Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2016

1999

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2007

2001

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

V8.0, August 2021

11.3.2, February 2024

5.20, May 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence 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.

ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

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

Implementation language

C++

C and Java

C and C++

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux

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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

Standard with numerous extensions

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
gokb
JDBC
kdbndp
ODBC
PDI
PDO
Pro*C
psycopg2
QT

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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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Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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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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