DBMS > RDF4J vs. Snowflake vs. SwayDB vs. Virtuoso vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison RDF4J vs. Snowflake vs. SwayDB vs. Virtuoso vs. Weaviate

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

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

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

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

RDF store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

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

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.71
Rank	#231	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#373	Overall
	#57	Key-value stores

Score	4.20
Rank	#83	Overall
	#14	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#45	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Score	1.89
Rank	#138	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Website

rdf4j.org

www.snowflake.com

swaydb.simer.au

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

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

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Simer Plaha

OpenLink Software

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2004

2014

2018

1998

2019

Current release

7.2.11, September 2023

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

commercial

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

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

schema-free

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

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

GraphQL is used as query language

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

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

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

Java
PHP
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Kotlin
Scala

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

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

none

yes

Sharding

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

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

Atomic execution of operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

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

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)

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

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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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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