DBMS > Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake vs. SwayDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

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	807.76
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	42.68
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#384	Overall
	#60	Key-value stores

Website

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

neo4j.com

www.snowflake.com

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

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

neo4j.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Simer Plaha

Initial release

1989

2007

2014

2018

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.23, August 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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.

SQLServer Flex @ STACKIT offers a managed version of SQL Server with adjustable CPU, RAM, storage amount and speed, in enterprise grade to perfectly match all application requirements. All services are 100% GDPR-compliant.

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

Implementation language

C++

Java, Scala

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
Windows

Linux

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

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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 (Node.js)
Python

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

none

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

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic execution of operations

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

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

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

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