DBMS > Neo4j vs. RavenDB vs. SAP HANA vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. RavenDB vs. SAP HANA vs. Spark SQL

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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

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Graph DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	44.47
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	3.01
Rank	#101	Overall
	#17	Document stores

Score	45.84
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	19.15
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

neo4j.com

ravendb.net

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

ravendb.net/docs

help.sap.com/hana

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

Hibernating Rhinos

SAP

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2007

2010

2014

Current release

5.19, April 2024

5.4, July 2022

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based service

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

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux

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

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Appliance or cloud-service

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language (RQL)

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

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

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Multi-source replication

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

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

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

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

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

Authorization levels configured per client per database

yes

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

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

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

Licensing and pricing models

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

News

This Week in Neo4j: Google Cloud, Analysis, Knowledge Graph, Relationships and more
20 April 2024

Announcing NODES 2024: Submit Your Talk
17 April 2024

ISO GQL: A Defining Moment in the History of Database Innovation
17 April 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Podcast, RAG, Neo4j Guide, ERP and more
13 April 2024

Neo4j Brings GraphRAG Capabilities for GenAI to Google Cloud
9 April 2024

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