DBMS > DuckDB vs. Google BigQuery vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. NSDb vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison DuckDB vs. Google BigQuery vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. NSDb vs. SwayDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

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.

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store

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

Score	4.57
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Score	60.38
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

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

Website

duckdb.org

cloud.google.com/bigquery

cloud.google.com/spanner

nsdb.io

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

duckdb.org/docs

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

nsdb.io/Architecture

Developer

Google

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2018

2010

2017

2018

Current release

0.10, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C++

Java, Scala

Scala

Server operating systems

server-less

hosted

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Scala

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in JavaScript

Triggers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

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

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

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Atomic execution of operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Using Apache Lucene

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

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

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

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