DBMS > Derby vs. Graph Engine vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. MySQL vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison Derby vs. Graph Engine vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. MySQL vs. Neo4j

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	4.71
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	0.61
Rank	#240	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#35	Key-value stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

db.apache.org/derby

www.graphengine.io

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.mysql.com

neo4j.com

Technical documentation

db.apache.org/derby/manuals/index.html

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

dev.mysql.com/doc

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

1997

2010

1989

1995

2007

Current release

10.17.1.0, November 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

8.4.0, April 2024

5.19, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

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.

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

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

Implementation language

Java

.NET and C

C++

C and C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

.NET

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

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

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

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

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

Java

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures

yes

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

proprietary syntax

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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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