DBMS > Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Greenplum vs. PlanetScale vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Greenplum vs. PlanetScale vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A cloud-native relational database compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Designed for business critical applications.

Analytic Database platform built on PostgreSQL. Full name is Pivotal Greenplum Database

A logical database in Greenplum is an array of individual PostgreSQL databases working together to present a single database image.

Scalable, distributed, serverless MySQL database platform built on top of Vitess

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.82
Rank	#205	Overall
	#97	Relational DBMS

Score	7.71
Rank	#46	Overall
	#29	Relational DBMS

Score	1.09
Rank	#178	Overall
	#82	Relational DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

greenplum.org

planetscale.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/polardb/product-overview

docs.greenplum.org

planetscale.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Alibaba

Pivotal Software Inc.

PlanetScale

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2005

2020

2014

Current release

7.0.0, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Implementation language

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

Docker
Linux
macOS

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

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

since Version 4.2

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
MySQL protocol
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

C
Java
Perl
Python
R

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

proprietary syntax

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica 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 across shards
Immediate Consistency within a shard

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID at shard level

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Licensing and pricing models

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