DBMS > H2 vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. RRDtool vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison H2 vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. RRDtool vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

Widely used in-process key-value store

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	8.33
Rank	#46	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	1.90
Rank	#132	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.h2database.com

neo4j.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

neo4j.com/docs

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Thomas Mueller

Neo4j, Inc.

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Tobias Oetiker

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2005

2007

1994

1999

2014

Current release

2.2.220, July 2023

5.20, May 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

1.8.0, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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

Java

Java, Scala

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

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

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

HP-UX
Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

in-process shared library
Pipes

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java

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

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

only for the SQL API

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

yes

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

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica 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

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

none

Immediate Consistency

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, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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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...
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Licensing and pricing models

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
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