DBMS > Google BigQuery vs. Neo4j vs. RDF4J vs. Stardog vs. Vertica

System Properties Comparison Google BigQuery vs. Neo4j vs. RDF4J vs. Stardog vs. Vertica

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

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.

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Cloud or off-cloud analytical database and query engine for structured and semi-structured streaming and batch data. Machine learning platform with built-in algorithms, data preparation capabilities, and model evaluation and management via SQL or Python.

Primary database model

Column oriented

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	58.10
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.74
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	2.07
Rank	#122	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Score	10.06
Rank	#42	Overall
	#26	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/bigquery

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

neo4j.com/docs

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.stardog.com

vertica.com/documentation

Developer

Google

Neo4j, Inc.

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

Stardog-Union

OpenText

previously Micro Focus and Hewlett Packard

Initial release

2010

2007

2004

2010

2005

Current release

5.20, May 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

12.0.3, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

commercial

Limited community edition free

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

on-premises, all major clouds - Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and containers

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

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

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

RDF Schemas

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Yes, but also semi-structure/unstructured data storage, and complex hierarchical data (like Parquet) stored and/or queried.

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

No Indexes Required. Different internal optimization strategy, but same functionality included.

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

Full 1999 standard plus machine learning, time series and geospatial. Over 650 functions.

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON 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

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET
JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spark Connector
vSQL

character-based, interactive, front-end utility

Supported programming languages

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Java
PHP
Python

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in JavaScript

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

yes, PostgreSQL PL/pgSQL, with minor differences

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

via event handlers

yes, called Custom Alerts

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

horizontal partitioning, hierarchical partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

Multi-source replication

One, or more copies of data replicated across nodes, or object-store used for repository.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Bi-directional Spark integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

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

Access rights for users and roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard; supports Kerberos, LDAP, Ident and hash

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

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Market metrics

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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...
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Cost-based models and subscription-based models are both available. One license is...
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