DBMS > Graph Engine vs. H2 vs. HyperSQL vs. Neo4j vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Graph Engine vs. H2 vs. HyperSQL vs. Neo4j vs. SQLite

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

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.61
Rank	#240	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#35	Key-value stores

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	3.49
Rank	#87	Overall
	#47	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

neo4j.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Microsoft

Thomas Mueller

Neo4j, Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2010

2005

2001

2007

2000

Current release

2.2.220, July 2023

2.7.2, June 2023

5.19, April 2024

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

Open Source

based on BSD license

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

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

Implementation language

.NET and C

Java

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

.NET

All OS with a Java VM

Embedded (into Java applications) and Client-Server operating modes

Linux

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

server-less

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

Java

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

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

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

Java, SQL

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

none

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

via file-system locks

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 capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

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

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

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

News

Creating the GQL Database Language Standard
7 May 2024

This Week in Neo4j: GraphRAG, Knowledge Graphs, Open Source AI, GraphQL and more
4 May 2024

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

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