DBMS > GraphDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison GraphDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite vs. Weaviate

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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.

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

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

Primary database model

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

Score	3.32
Rank	#91	Overall
	#6	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

www.ontotext.com

sphinxsearch.com

www.sqlite.org

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Social network pages

Developer

Ontotext

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2000

2001

2000

2019

Current release

10.4, October 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

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

yes

dynamic column types

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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.

Secondary indexes

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

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

GraphQL is used as query language

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

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

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

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

none

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 (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Eventual Consistency

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

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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.

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
» more

Competitive advantages

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

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
» more

Key customers

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

All companies that have data.
» more

Market metrics

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

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

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

News

Understanding the Graph Center of Excellence
17 May 2024

Migrating From LPG to RDF Graph Model
8 May 2024

Case study: Policy Enforcement Automation With Semantics
2 May 2024

Okay, RAG… We Have a Problem
26 April 2024

Scaling Understanding with the Help of Feedback Loops, Knowledge Graphs and NLP
19 April 2024

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