DBMS > Google BigQuery vs. Postgres-XL vs. Riak KV vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Google BigQuery vs. Postgres-XL vs. Riak KV vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	52.67
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	0.43
Rank	#260	Overall
	#119	Relational DBMS

Score	3.84
Rank	#76	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/bigquery

www.postgres-xl.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2009

2014

Current release

10 R1, October 2018

3.2.0, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

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

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X

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

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in JavaScript

user defined functions

Erlang

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

links between data sets can be stored

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

MVCC

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.

User concepts

Access control

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

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes, using Riak Security

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

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