DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Graph Engine vs. Microsoft Access vs. Neo4j vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Graph Engine vs. Microsoft Access vs. Neo4j vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Document store

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.61
Rank	#240	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#35	Key-value stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.graphengine.io

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

neo4j.com

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

neo4j.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2012

2010

1992

2007

2000

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

5.19, April 2024

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Public Domain

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

.NET and C

C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

.NET

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux

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

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

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

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

yes

but no files for transaction logging

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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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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