DBMS > Apache Drill vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. HyperSQL vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. HyperSQL vs. Snowflake

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage

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.

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

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

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.02
Rank	#124	Overall
	#22	Document stores
	#59	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	3.23
Rank	#93	Overall
	#48	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

drill.apache.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

hsqldb.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Google

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2017

2001

2014

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

2.7.2, June 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

based on BSD license

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.

Implementation language

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Embedded (into Java applications) and Client-Server operating modes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
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

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C++

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Java, SQL

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

none

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

none

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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.