DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. PostGIS vs. Realm vs. Snowflake vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. PostGIS vs. Realm vs. Snowflake vs. TimescaleDB

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

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.89
Rank	#128	Overall
	#22	Key-value stores

Score	20.16
Rank	#29	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Score	7.18
Rank	#52	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	4.06
Rank	#73	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

postgis.net/documentation

realm.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Amazon

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2007

2005

2014

2017

Current release

3.4.2, February 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL v2.0

Open Source

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

Server operating systems

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

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

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data 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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All columns are indexed automatically

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

user defined functions

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Change Listeners

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

yes

based on PostgreSQL

none

yes

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

based on PostgreSQL

none

yes

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Concurrent data updates can be detected by the application

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.

yes

In-Memory realm

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

yes

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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