DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. GraphDB vs. RDF4J vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. GraphDB vs. RDF4J vs. SQLite

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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.

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.

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

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

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	3.32
Rank	#91	Overall
	#6	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	0.69
Rank	#230	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.ontotext.com

rdf4j.org

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

rdf4j.org/documentation

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Social network pages

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Ontotext

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

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2012

2000

2004

2000

Current release

10.4, October 2023

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

Public Domain

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

RDF Schemas

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

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

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

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

Java
PHP
Python

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'

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

yes

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

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

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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.

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
» more

Competitive advantages

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

Typical application scenarios

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

Key customers

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

Market metrics

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

Licensing and pricing models

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

News

Migrating From LPG to RDF Graph Model
8 May 2024

Case study: Policy Enforcement Automation With Semantics
2 May 2024

Okay, RAG… We Have a Problem
26 April 2024

Scaling Understanding with the Help of Feedback Loops, Knowledge Graphs and NLP
19 April 2024

How Knowledge Graphs Power Data Mesh and Data Fabric
10 April 2024

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