DBMS > Couchbase vs. CrateDB vs. IBM Db2 vs. Neo4j vs. RocksDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. CrateDB vs. IBM Db2 vs. Neo4j vs. RocksDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Distributed Database based on Lucene

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

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

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.73
Rank	#224	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#8	Vector DBMS

Score	128.46
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	3.65
Rank	#85	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Website

www.couchbase.com

cratedb.com

www.ibm.com/products/db2

neo4j.com

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

cratedb.com/docs

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

neo4j.com/docs

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Crate

IBM

Neo4j, Inc.

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

2011

2013

1983

host version

2007

2013

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

12.1, October 2016

5.19, April 2024

8.11.4, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

commercial

free version is available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

BSD

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.

CrateDB Cloud: a distributed SQL database that spreads data and processing across an elastic cluster of shared nothing nodes. CrateDB Cloud enables data insights at scale on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

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

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

C and C++

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Linux

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

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, 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

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

yes

APIs and other access methods

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Prometheus Remote Read/Write
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

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
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

.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

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

user defined functions (Javascript)

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

yes using Neo4j Fabric

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

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

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency
Read-after-write consistency on record level

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

ACID

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

rights management via user accounts

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

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native...
» more

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

Competitive advantages

Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling...
» more

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

Typical application scenarios

IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics...
» more

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
» more

Key customers

Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most...
» more

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

Market metrics

The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®...
» more

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

See CrateDB pricing >
» more

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
» more

News

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16 May 2024

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15 May 2024

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15 May 2024

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13 May 2024

This Week in Neo4j: GraphRAG, Testcontainers, Metadata Management, App Dev and more
11 May 2024

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.