DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Spark SQL

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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.

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational 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	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cloud.google.com/spanner

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Amazon

Google

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

2017

2014

Current release

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate 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

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.

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)

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