DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. PostGIS vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. PostGIS vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

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

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

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	21.72
Rank	#29	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

postgis.net

www.snowflake.com

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

postgis.net/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

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

Developer

Amazon

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

2005

2014

Current release

3.4.2, February 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

GPL v2.0

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

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

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

based on PostgreSQL

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

based on PostgreSQL

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

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

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

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)

yes

based on PostgreSQL

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

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.