DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted simple database service by Amazon, with the data stored in the Amazon Cloud.

There is an unrelated product called SimpleDB developed by Edward Sciore

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.

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

Primary database model

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.88
Rank	#139	Overall
	#24	Key-value stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#105	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Amazon

Google

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2007

2017

2014

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

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

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

All columns are indexed automatically

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Erlang
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

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

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

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Concurrent data updates can be detected by the application

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.

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)

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

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