DBMS > Neo4j vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB vs. Transbase

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB vs. Transbase

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

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

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

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

A resource-optimized, high-performance, universally applicable RDBMS

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	3.95
Rank	#80	Overall
	#42	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.23
Rank	#316	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Score	0.17
Rank	#334	Overall
	#148	Relational DBMS

Website

neo4j.com

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

www.snowflake.com

terminusdb.com

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase.html

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase/features.html

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

SAP

formerly Sybase

Snowflake Computing Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

Transaction Software GmbH

Initial release

2007

1992

2014

2018

1987

Current release

5.20, May 2024

17, July 2015

11.0.0, January 2023

Transbase 8.3, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

commercial

free development license

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

Prolog, Rust

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux

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

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

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

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

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

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

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

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript
Python

C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Objective-C
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

yes

Graph Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

yes

Journaling Streams

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

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)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Role-based access control

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...
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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...
» more

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

Neo4j-Databricks Connector Delivers Deeper Insights, Faster GenAI Development
10 June 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Podcast, Testing, Knowledge Graph, GenAI and more
8 June 2024

Neo4j and Snowflake Bring Graph Data Science Into the AI Data Cloud
4 June 2024

RDF vs. Property Graphs: Choosing the Right Approach for Implementing a Knowledge Graph
4 June 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Importing Data, NODES, GenAI, Going Meta and more
1 June 2024

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