DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Impala vs. Neo4j vs. NuoDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Impala vs. Neo4j vs. NuoDB

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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.

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

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

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Score	18.92
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	18.03
Rank	#40	Overall
	#25	Relational DBMS

Score	60.14
Rank	#19	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.97
Rank	#179	Overall
	#87	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.cloudera.com/products/open-source/apache-hadoop/impala.html

neo4j.com

nuodb.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.cloudera.com/documentation/enterprise/latest/topics/impala.html

neo4j.com/docs

doc.nuodb.com

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Cloudera

Neo4j, Inc.

NuoDB, Inc.

Initial release

2012

2013

2007

2013

Current release

4.0.0, July 2021

4.4.7, May 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

limited edition free

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

C++

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

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

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Java, SQL

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

tunable commit protocol

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC

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

Temporary table

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

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

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
» more

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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