DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. MySQL vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle NoSQL

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. MySQL vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle NoSQL

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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

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

A multi-model, scalable, distributed NoSQL database, designed to provide highly reliable, flexible, and available data management across a configurable set of storage nodes

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Graph DBMS

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	134.78
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1087.72
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	44.47
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.96
Rank	#103	Overall
	#18	Document stores
	#17	Key-value stores
	#52	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.mysql.com

neo4j.com

www.oracle.com/database/nosql/technologies/nosql

Technical documentation

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

dev.mysql.com/doc

neo4j.com/docs

docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/nosql-database/index.html

Developer

Elastic

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Neo4j, Inc.

Oracle

Initial release

2010

1995

2007

2011

Current release

8.6, January 2023

8.3.0, January 2024

5.19, April 2024

23.3, December 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Proprietary for Enterprise Edition (Oracle Database EE license has Oracle NoSQL database EE covered: details)

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

C and C++

Java, Scala

Java

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

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

Linux
Solaris SPARC/x86

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

Support Fixed schema and Schema-less deployment with the ability to interoperate between them.

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

optional

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

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

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

C
C#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

proprietary syntax

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Electable source-replica replication per shard. Support distributed global deployment with Multi-region table feature

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

with Hadoop integration

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

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

depending on configuration

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

configurable

ACID within a storage node (=shard)

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

In-memory capabilities

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

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

off heap cache

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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

Access rights for users and roles

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...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
» more

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