DBMS > Couchbase vs. FoundationDB vs. Interbase vs. Neo4j vs. Sqrrl

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. FoundationDB vs. Interbase vs. Neo4j vs. Sqrrl

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

Sqrrl has been acquired by Amazon and became a part of Amazon Web Services. It has been removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

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

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

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

Adaptable, secure NoSQL built on Apache Accumulo

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column 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

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.03
Rank	#190	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

neo4j.com

sqrrl.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

apple.github.io/foundationdb

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

FoundationDB

Embarcadero

Neo4j, Inc.

Amazon

originally Sqrrl Data, Inc.

Initial release

2011

2013

1984

2007

2012

Current release

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

6.2.28, November 2020

InterBase 2020, December 2019

5.19, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

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.

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

C++

Java, Scala

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

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.

export as XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

supported in specific SQL layer only

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

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Accumulo Shell
Java API
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

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

Actionscript
C

using GLib
C#
C++
Cocoa
Delphi
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

in SQL-layer only

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

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

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

making use of Hadoop

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Interbase Change Views

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

selectable replication factor

making use of Hadoop

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

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Document store kept consistent with combination of global timestamping, row-level transactions, and server-side consistency resolution.

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic updates per row, document, or graph entity

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

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.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Cell-level Security, Data-Centric Security, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)

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

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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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