DBMS > Graph Engine vs. MySQL vs. RDF4J vs. TimescaleDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Graph Engine vs. MySQL vs. RDF4J vs. TimescaleDB vs. Weaviate

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

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

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

RDF store

Time Series DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	0.74
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

dev.mysql.com/doc

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.timescale.com

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

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

Timescale

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2010

1995

2004

2017

2019

Current release

8.4.0, April 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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.

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Implementation language

.NET and C

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

.NET

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

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

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

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

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Java
PHP
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

proprietary syntax

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

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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