DBMS > HEAVY.AI vs. MariaDB vs. Neo4j vs. SAP HANA vs. VelocityDB

System Properties Comparison HEAVY.AI vs. MariaDB vs. Neo4j vs. SAP HANA vs. VelocityDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

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

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

A .NET Object Database that can be embedded/distributed and extended to a graph data model (VelocityGraph)

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
Object oriented DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	44.27
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#354	Overall
	#37	Graph DBMS
	#15	Object oriented DBMS

Website

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

neo4j.com

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

velocitydb.com

Technical documentation

docs.heavy.ai

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

neo4j.com/docs

help.sap.com/hana

velocitydb.com/UserGuide

Developer

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Neo4j, Inc.

SAP

VelocityDB Inc

Initial release

2016

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2007

2010

2011

Current release

5.10, January 2022

11.3.2, February 2024

5.20, May 2024

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

7.x

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

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

Implementation language

C++ and CUDA

C and C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux

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

Appliance or cloud-service

Any that supports .NET

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

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

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

JDBC
ODBC

.Net

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

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

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

.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Round robin

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

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)

yes

Based on Windows Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
» more

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

Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
» more

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
» more

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
» more

Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
» more

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
» more

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
» more

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

News

Neo4j and Snowflake Bring Graph Data Science Into the AI Data Cloud
4 June 2024

RDF vs. Property Graphs: Choosing the Right Approach for Implementing a Knowledge Graph
4 June 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Importing Data, NODES, GenAI, Going Meta and more
1 June 2024

openCypher Will Pave the Road to GQL for Cypher Implementers
22 May 2024

7 Tips for Submitting Your NODES 2024 Talk
22 May 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.