DBMS > Google Cloud Firestore vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NCache vs. Neo4j vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Firestore vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NCache vs. Neo4j vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Open-Source and Enterprise in-memory Key-Value Store

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

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Search engine

Using distributed Lucene

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

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.94
Rank	#195	Overall
	#29	Key-value stores

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.02
Rank	#123	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.alachisoft.com/ncache

neo4j.com

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

www.alachisoft.com/resources/docs

neo4j.com/docs

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Google

Microsoft

Alachisoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2017

1989

2005

2007

2010

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.3.3, April 2024

5.19, April 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Enterprise Edition available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

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

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++

C#, .NET, .NET Core, Java

Java, Scala

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux

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

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

partial

Supported data types are Lists, Queues, Hashsets, Dictionary and Counter

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query syntax and LINQ for searching the cache. Cache Synchronization with SQL Server using SQL dependency.

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

APIs and other access methods

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

IDistributedCache
JCache
LINQ
Proprietary native API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

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

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

.Net
.Net Core
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

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

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

support for stored procedures with SQL-Server CLR

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

Notifications

yes

via event handler

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes, with selectable consistency level

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Strong Eventual Consistency over WAN with Conflict Resolution using Bridge Topology

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

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

optimistic locking and pessimistic locking

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Authentication to access the cache via Active Directory/LDAP (possible roles: user, administrator)

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

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

NCache has been the market leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005 . NCache...
» more

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

Competitive advantages

NCache is 100% .NET/ .NET Core based which fully supports ASP.NET Core Sessions ,...
» more

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

Typical application scenarios

NCache enables industries like retail, finance, banking IoT, travel, ecommerce, healthcare...
» more

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
» more

Key customers

Bank of America, Citi, Natures Way, Charter Spectrum, Barclays, Henry Schein, GBM,...
» more

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

Market metrics

Market Leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005.
» more

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

NCache Open Source is free on an as-is basis without any support. NCache Enterprise...
» more

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

News

This Week in Neo4j: Nodes 2024, Data Modelling, Events, Knowledge Graphs and more
27 April 2024

GQL is Here: Your Cypher Queries in a GQL World
26 April 2024

GQL: The ISO Standard for Graphs Has Arrived
25 April 2024

What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
24 April 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Google Cloud, Analysis, Knowledge Graph, Relationships and more
20 April 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.