DBMS > CouchDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Neo4j vs. SAP HANA vs. VelocityDB

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Neo4j vs. SAP HANA vs. VelocityDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

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

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

A .NET Object Database that can be embedded/distributed and extended to a graph data model (VelocityGraph)

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
Object oriented DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	44.27
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#354	Overall
	#37	Graph DBMS
	#15	Object oriented DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

neo4j.com

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

velocitydb.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

docs.heavy.ai

neo4j.com/docs

help.sap.com/hana

velocitydb.com/UserGuide

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Neo4j, Inc.

SAP

VelocityDB Inc

Initial release

2005

2016

2007

2010

2011

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

5.10, January 2022

5.20, May 2024

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

7.x

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based service

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

Erlang

C++ and CUDA

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

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

Appliance or cloud-service

Any that supports .NET

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

JDBC
ODBC

.Net

Supported programming languages

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

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

.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

Round robin

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

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

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

yes

Based on Windows Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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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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