DBMS > GraphDB vs. PostgreSQL vs. RDFox

System Properties Comparison GraphDB vs. PostgreSQL vs. RDFox

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

High performance knowledge graph and semantic reasoning engine

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.59
Rank	#96	Overall
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#3	RDF stores

Score	674.32
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	0.24
Rank	#299	Overall
	#24	Graph DBMS
	#12	RDF stores

Website

www.ontotext.com

www.postgresql.org

www.oxfordsemantic.tech

Technical documentation

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

www.postgresql.org/docs

docs.oxfordsemantic.tech

Developer

Ontotext

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Oxford Semantic Technologies

Initial release

2000

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2017

Current release

10.4, October 2023

16.4, August 2024

6.0, Septermber 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

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

yes

RDF schemas

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.

yes

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

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

standard with numerous extensions

APIs and other access methods

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

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

RESTful HTTP API
SPARQL 1.1

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

C
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

replication via a shared file system

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

Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode, Eventual Consistency in replicated setups

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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

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

Roles, resources, and access types

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