DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. GraphDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Stardog vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. GraphDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Stardog vs. Virtuoso

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Search engine

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	3.25
Rank	#91	Overall
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.07
Rank	#122	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Score	4.27
Rank	#73	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#39	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.ontotext.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.stardog.com

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.stardog.com

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Social network pages

Developer

Elastic

Ontotext

Microsoft

Stardog-Union

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2010

2000

2014

2010

1998

Current release

8.6, January 2023

10.4, October 2023

7.3.0, May 2020

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license 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.

Implementation language

Java

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

schema-free

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

SQL-like query language

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

JavaScript

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

JavaScript

yes

via event handlers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

yes

relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

User concepts

Access control

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Access rights for users and roles

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
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Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
» more

Competitive advantages

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
» more

Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
» more

Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
» more

Key customers

GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
» more

Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
» more

Market metrics

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
» more

Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
» more

Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
» more

News

Riding the Databricks Wave with Hybrid Knowledge Graphs
6 June 2024

Matching Skills and Candidates with Graph RAG
31 May 2024

A Triple Store RAG Retriever
29 May 2024

Integrating GraphDB with Relational Database Systems
23 May 2024

Understanding the Graph Center of Excellence
17 May 2024

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.