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

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

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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.

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

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

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

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	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

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

Website

drill.apache.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.snowflake.com

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Google

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2012

2017

2014

2018

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

schema-free

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C++

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Kotlin
Scala

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

Sharding

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

none

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

Atomic execution of operations

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)

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

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