DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. IBM Db2 vs. Neo4j vs. RDF4J vs. RocksDB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. IBM Db2 vs. Neo4j vs. RDF4J vs. RocksDB

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

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

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

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Graph DBMS

RDF store

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	128.46
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#230	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	3.65
Rank	#85	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.ibm.com/products/db2

neo4j.com

rdf4j.org

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

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

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

neo4j.com/docs

rdf4j.org/documentation

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

Elastic

IBM

Neo4j, Inc.

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

2010

1983

host version

2007

2004

2013

Current release

8.6, January 2023

12.1, October 2016

5.19, April 2024

8.11.4, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

free version is available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

BSD

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

Java

C and C++

Java, Scala

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Linux

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

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

RDF Schemas

schema-free

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

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

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

Java
PHP
Python

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

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

Isolation support depends on the API used

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

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

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

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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