DBMS > RDF4J vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. VelocityDB vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison RDF4J vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. VelocityDB vs. Virtuoso

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

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

A .NET Object Database that can be embedded/distributed and extended to a graph data model (VelocityGraph)

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

RDF store

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Graph DBMS
Object oriented DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.74
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.11
Rank	#354	Overall
	#37	Graph DBMS
	#15	Object oriented DBMS

Score	4.27
Rank	#73	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#39	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

velocitydb.com/UserGuide

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

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

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

VelocityDB Inc

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2004

2014

2001

2011

1998

Current release

3.5.1, February 2023

7.x

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

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.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Any that supports .NET

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

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

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

.Net

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

Java
PHP
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

.Net

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

Sharding

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

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

none

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

User concepts

Access control

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

Based on Windows Authentication

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
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Competitive advantages

Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Typical application scenarios

Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Key customers

Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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Licensing and pricing models

Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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