DBMS > Ehcache vs. GigaSpaces vs. Google BigQuery vs. Neo4j vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Ehcache vs. GigaSpaces vs. Google BigQuery vs. Neo4j vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A widely adopted Java cache with tiered storage options

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Key-value store

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	4.89
Rank	#67	Overall
	#8	Key-value stores

Score	0.97
Rank	#192	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	60.38
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.ehcache.org

www.gigaspaces.com

cloud.google.com/bigquery

neo4j.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

www.ehcache.org/documentation

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

neo4j.com/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Terracotta Inc, owned by Software AG

Gigaspaces Technologies

Google

Neo4j, Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2009

2000

2010

2007

2001

Current release

3.10.0, March 2022

15.5, September 2020

5.19, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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

Java, C++, .Net

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux

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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

JCache

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

Java

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

in JavaScript

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

Cache Event Listeners

yes, event driven architecture

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

by using Terracotta Server

Sharding

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

by using Terracotta Server

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Tunable Consistency (Strong, Eventual, Weak)

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

Immediate Consistency

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

yes

supports JTA and can work as an XA resource

ACID

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using a tiered cache-storage approach

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Role-based access control

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

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

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

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

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