DBMS > GigaSpaces vs. MariaDB vs. Neo4j vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison GigaSpaces vs. MariaDB vs. Neo4j vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

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

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Secondary database models

Graph DBMS
Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.03
Rank	#188	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.74
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.gigaspaces.com

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

neo4j.com

rdf4j.org

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

neo4j.com/docs

rdf4j.org/documentation

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Gigaspaces Technologies

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Neo4j, Inc.

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

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2000

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2007

2004

2001

Current release

15.5, September 2020

11.3.2, February 2024

5.20, May 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Implementation language

Java, C++, .Net

C and C++

Java, Scala

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux

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

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

RDF Schemas

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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

Java
PHP
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

Triggers

yes, event driven architecture

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

Immediate Consistency

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

User concepts

Access control

Role-based access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
» more

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
» more

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
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News

This Week in Neo4j: Podcast, Testing, Knowledge Graph, GenAI and more
8 June 2024

Neo4j and Snowflake Bring Graph Data Science Into the AI Data Cloud
4 June 2024

RDF vs. Property Graphs: Choosing the Right Approach for Implementing a Knowledge Graph
4 June 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Importing Data, NODES, GenAI, Going Meta and more
1 June 2024

openCypher Will Pave the Road to GQL for Cypher Implementers
22 May 2024

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