DBMS > Couchbase vs. HyperSQL vs. IRONdb vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. HyperSQL vs. IRONdb vs. Neo4j

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded 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

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

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

Primary database model

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	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	3.23
Rank	#93	Overall
	#48	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

hsqldb.org

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

neo4j.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Circonus LLC.

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2011

2001

2017

2007

Current release

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

2.7.2, June 2023

V0.10.20, January 2018

5.20, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

based on BSD license

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses 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.

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

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Embedded (into Java applications) and Client-Server operating modes

Linux

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

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

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

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

Java, SQL

yes, in Lua

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

none

Automatic, metric affinity per node

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

none

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

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

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

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

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.

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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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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