DBMS > Hazelcast vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison Hazelcast vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A widely adopted in-memory data grid

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

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

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

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

JSON support with IMDG 3.12

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	5.97
Rank	#57	Overall
	#6	Key-value stores

Score	77.99
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	2.02
Rank	#123	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

hazelcast.com

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

neo4j.com

www.snowflake.com

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

hazelcast.org/imdg/docs

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

neo4j.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Hazelcast

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2008

2010

2007

2014

2010

Current release

5.3.6, November 2023

V12

5.19, April 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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

C++

Java, Scala

Java

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux

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

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

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

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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

the object must implement a serialization strategy

yes

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

JCache
JPA
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

.Net
C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

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

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Event Listeners, Executor Services

Transact SQL

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

Events

yes

via event handler

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Replicated Map

yes, with always 3 replicas available

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency selectable by user

Raft Consensus Algorithm

Immediate Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

one or two-phase-commit; repeatable reads; read commited

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

Role-based 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

Access rights for users and roles

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