DBMS > FileMaker vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake vs. Solr vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison FileMaker vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake vs. Solr vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

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

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

A widely used distributed, scalable search engine based on Apache Lucene

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	47.91
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	41.02
Rank	#24	Overall
	#3	Search engines

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

Website

www.claris.com/filemaker

Technical documentation

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

neo4j.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

solr.apache.org/resources.html

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Neo4j, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Stardog-Union

Initial release

1983

2007

2014

2006

2010

Current release

19.4.1, November 2021

5.20, May 2024

9.6.1, May 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

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

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, Scala

Java

Server operating systems

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

runs as a servlet in servlet container (e.g. Tomcat, Jetty is included)

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Dynamic Fields enables on-the-fly addition of new fields

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

supports customizable data types and automatic typing

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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

yes

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

via plugins

yes

Solr Parallel SQL Interface

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

APIs and other access methods

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Supported programming languages

PHP

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
Erlang
Java
JavaScript
any language that supports sockets and either XML or JSON
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

Java plugins

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

via event handler

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

User configurable commands triggered on index changes

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

spark-solr: github.com/lucidworks/spark-solr and streaming expressions to reduce

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

optimistic locking

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

simple rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

yes

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...
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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...
» more

News

This Week in Neo4j: Podcast, Testing, Knowledge Graph, GenAI and more
8 June 2024

Neo4j and Snowflake Bring Graph Data Science Into the AI Data Cloud
4 June 2024

RDF vs. Property Graphs: Choosing the Right Approach for Implementing a Knowledge Graph
4 June 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Importing Data, NODES, GenAI, Going Meta and more
1 June 2024

openCypher Will Pave the Road to GQL for Cypher Implementers
22 May 2024

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