DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Neo4j vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Snowflake vs. Splunk

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Neo4j vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Snowflake vs. Splunk

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.

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

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

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

Analytics Platform for Big Data

Primary database model

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

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	3.95
Rank	#80	Overall
	#42	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	89.10
Rank	#14	Overall
	#2	Search engines

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

neo4j.com

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

www.snowflake.com

www.splunk.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

neo4j.com/docs

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Neo4j, Inc.

SAP

formerly Sybase

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Splunk Inc.

Initial release

2012

2007

1992

2014

2003

Current release

5.20, May 2024

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Limited free edition and free developer edition available

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

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

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

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

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

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Splunk Search Processing Language for search commands

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

via event handler

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

yes

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

A 'Transaction' in Splunk has a different meaning: grouping related events into a single one for later searching

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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...
» more

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