DBMS > Citus vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Rockset vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Rockset vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

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.

A scalable, reliable search and analytics service in the cloud, built on RocksDB

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Relational DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	0.79
Rank	#211	Overall
	#35	Document stores

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

rockset.com

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.rockset.com

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

Rockset

SAP

formerly Sybase

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2017

2019

1992

2014

Current release

8.1, December 2018

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

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

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

dynamic typing

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

ingestion from XML files supported

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

Read-only SQL queries, including JOINs

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

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

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Access rights for users and organizations can be defined via Rockset console

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.