DBMS > Interbase vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Interbase vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

A Wide Column Store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	4.48
Rank	#75	Overall
	#6	Wide column stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/tables

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

neo4j.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

neo4j.com/docs

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Embarcadero

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

1984

2012

1989

2007

2019

Current release

InterBase 2020, December 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.19, April 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux

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

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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.

export as XML data possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Interbase Change Views

yes

implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

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

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

optimistic locking

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

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

Access rights based on private key authentication or shared access signatures

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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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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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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