DBMS > Datomic vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. PouchDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Datomic vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. PouchDB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

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

Widely used in-process key-value store

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.66
Rank	#144	Overall
	#66	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.datomic.com

neo4j.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

pouchdb.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.datomic.com

neo4j.com/docs

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

pouchdb.com/guides

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Cognitect

Neo4j, Inc.

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Apache Software Foundation

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2007

1994

2012

2014

Current release

1.0.6735, June 2023

5.20, May 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

limited edition free

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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

Java, Clojure

Java, Scala

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

JavaScript

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

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

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Clojure
Java

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

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

JavaScript

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transaction Functions

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

View functions in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

By using transaction functions

yes

via event handler

yes

only for the SQL API

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

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

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

recommended only for testing and development

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable 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

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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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