DBMS > MariaDB vs. Neo4j vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx vs. Sqrrl

System Properties Comparison MariaDB vs. Neo4j vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx vs. Sqrrl

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Sqrrl has been acquired by Amazon and became a part of Amazon Web Services. It has been removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

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

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

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

Adaptable, secure NoSQL built on Apache Accumulo

Primary database model

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#230	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

neo4j.com

rdf4j.org

sphinxsearch.com

sqrrl.com

Technical documentation

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

neo4j.com/docs

rdf4j.org/documentation

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

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

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Neo4j, Inc.

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Amazon

originally Sqrrl Data, Inc.

Initial release

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2007

2004

2001

2012

Current release

11.3.2, February 2024

5.19, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

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.

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 C++

Java, Scala

Java

C++

Java

Server operating systems

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

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

schema-free

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

Proprietary protocol

Accumulo Shell
Java API
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

Supported programming languages

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

Java
PHP
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Actionscript
C

using GLib
C#
C++
Cocoa
Delphi
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Sharding

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

Sharding

making use of Hadoop

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

selectable replication factor

making use of Hadoop

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Document store kept consistent with combination of global timestamping, row-level transactions, and server-side consistency resolution.

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

Atomic updates per row, document, or graph entity

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

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

with MEMORY storage engine

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)

Cell-level Security, Data-Centric Security, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
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