DBMS > Graph Engine vs. GraphDB vs. RDF4J vs. RocksDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Graph Engine vs. GraphDB vs. RDF4J vs. RocksDB vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

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

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	0.67
Rank	#232	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#34	Key-value stores

Score	3.25
Rank	#91	Overall
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	0.74
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

rdf4j.org/documentation

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.timescale.com

Social network pages

Developer

Microsoft

Ontotext

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

Facebook, Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2010

2000

2004

2013

2017

Current release

10.4, October 2023

9.2.1, May 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Implementation language

.NET and C

Java

C++

Server operating systems

.NET

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

yes

RDF Schemas

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

Secondary indexes

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

C++ API
Java API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
PHP
Python

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

yes

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

none

horizontal partitioning

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

none

yes

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

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

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
» more

Competitive advantages

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
» more

Key customers

GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
» more

Market metrics

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
» more

News

Riding the Databricks Wave with Hybrid Knowledge Graphs
6 June 2024

Matching Skills and Candidates with Graph RAG
31 May 2024

A Triple Store RAG Retriever
29 May 2024

Integrating GraphDB with Relational Database Systems
23 May 2024

Understanding the Graph Center of Excellence
17 May 2024

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.