DBMS > Apache Drill vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. RocksDB vs. SwayDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. RocksDB vs. SwayDB vs. TimescaleDB

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.

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

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

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.95
Rank	#127	Overall
	#23	Document stores
	#60	Relational DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	3.65
Rank	#85	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	0.00
Rank	#382	Overall
	#59	Key-value stores

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

drill.apache.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

rocksdb.org

swaydb.simer.au

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Google

Facebook, Inc.

Simer Plaha

Timescale

Initial release

2012

2017

2013

2018

2017

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

8.11.4, April 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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

C++

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

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

C++ API
Java API

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

Supported programming languages

C++

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Java
Kotlin
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

yes

Atomic execution of operations

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

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