DBMS > Amazon Neptune vs. Google Cloud Spanner

System Properties Comparison Amazon Neptune vs. Google Cloud Spanner

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Our visitors often compare Amazon Neptune and Google Cloud Spanner with Neo4j, Amazon Aurora and GraphDB.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fast, reliable graph database built for the 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.

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.11
Rank	#111	Overall
	#9	Graph DBMS
	#5	RDF stores

Score	2.56
Rank	#97	Overall
	#50	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/neptune

cloud.google.com/spanner

Technical documentation

aws.amazon.com/neptune/developer-resources

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

Developer

Amazon

Google

Initial release

2017

License

Commercial or Open Source

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.

Server operating systems

hosted

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

APIs and other access methods

OpenCypher
RDF 1.1 / SPARQL 1.1
TinkerPop Gremlin

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

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

Supported programming languages

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Triggers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-availability zones high availability, asynchronous replication for up to 15 read replicas within a single region. Global database clusters consists of a primary write DB cluster in one region, and up to five secondary read DB clusters in different regions. Each secondary region can have up to 16 reader instances.

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

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

Strict serializable isolation

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with encyption-at-rest

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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More resources

Recent citations in the news

Using generative AI and Amazon Bedrock to generate SPARQL queries to discover protein functional information with UniProtKB and Amazon Neptune
9 April 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Use Amazon Neptune Analytics to analyze relationships in your data faster, Part 1: Introducing Parquet and CSV import and export
21 January 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

How Coinbase provides trustworthy financial experiences through real-time user clustering with Amazon Neptune
18 November 2024, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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27 January 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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provided by Google News

Google Releases Spanner Graph into General Availability
19 February 2025, infoq.com

New features make Google's Spanner a database for AI
1 August 2024, TechTarget

Google Cloud Spanner gets dual-region configuration option
23 July 2024, InfoWorld

Google Cloud expands its database portfolio with new AI capabilities
1 August 2024, TechCrunch

Google Cloud Introduces HDD Tier for Spanner Database, Cutting Cold Storage Costs by 80%
22 March 2025, infoq.com

provided by Google News

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