DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Neo4j vs. SAP HANA vs. Spark SQL vs. Transbase

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Neo4j vs. SAP HANA vs. Spark SQL vs. Transbase

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

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

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

A resource-optimized, high-performance, universally applicable RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	44.69
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#341	Overall
	#150	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

neo4j.com

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

spark.apache.org/sql

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase.html

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

neo4j.com/docs

help.sap.com/hana

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase/features.html

Developer

Google

Neo4j, Inc.

SAP

Apache Software Foundation

Transaction Software GmbH

Initial release

2017

2007

2010

2014

1987

Current release

5.19, April 2024

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

Transbase 8.3, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free development license

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

also available as a cloud based service

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

Scala

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

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

Appliance or cloud-service

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Java
Python
R
Scala

C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Objective-C
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

SQLScript, R

yes

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

none

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

yes

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 (IAM)

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

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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...
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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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