DBMS > FoundationDB vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

Description

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

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

Widely used in-process key-value store

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

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.03
Rank	#190	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

neo4j.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

neo4j.com/docs

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

FoundationDB

Neo4j, Inc.

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

2007

1994

2014

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

5.20, May 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

commercial license available

commercial

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, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

some layers support 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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

APIs and other access methods

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

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

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

only for the SQL API

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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

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

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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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

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