DBMS > Amazon CloudSearch vs. EXASOL vs. GigaSpaces vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft SQL Server

System Properties Comparison Amazon CloudSearch vs. EXASOL vs. GigaSpaces vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft SQL Server

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A hosted search engine service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Graph DBMS
Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.85
Rank	#137	Overall
	#12	Search engines

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	0.97
Rank	#192	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

www.exasol.com

www.gigaspaces.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

www.exasol.com/resources

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

Developer

Amazon

Exasol

Gigaspaces Technologies

Google

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2000

2017

1989

Current release

15.5, September 2020

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

commercial

restricted free version is 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++, .Net

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

HTTP API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Supported programming languages

Java
Lua
Python
R

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

yes, event driven architecture

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes

automatic partitioning across Amazon Search Instance as required

Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

managed transparently by AWS

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

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

authentication via encrypted signatures

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

Role-based access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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