DBMS > Neo4j vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake vs. TimesTen

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Widely used in-process key-value store

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

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Relational DBMS

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

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

neo4j.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

www.snowflake.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2007

1994

2014

1998

Current release

5.19, April 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

commercial license available

commercial

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, Scala

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

Linux

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

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes

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

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

APIs and other access methods

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

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

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

only for the SQL API

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Competitive advantages

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

Typical application scenarios

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

Key customers

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

Market metrics

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

Licensing and pricing models

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

News

How to Configure Neo4j Aura With AWS PrivateLink
21 May 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Podcast, GraphRAG, GraphQL, Chatbot and more
18 May 2024

Neo4j Joins the Connect with Confluent Partner Program
16 May 2024

10 Inspiring Projects to Spark Your NODES 2024 Presentation
15 May 2024

New Security Feature in Neo4j Aura: Customer Managed Keys
15 May 2024

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