DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Graph Engine vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Graph Engine vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

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.

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	0.61
Rank	#240	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#35	Key-value stores

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.graphengine.io

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

Amazon

Google

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2017

2010

2014

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

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

.NET and C

Server operating systems

hosted

.NET

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

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

RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

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

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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