DBMS > Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Google Cloud Spanner

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Google Cloud Spanner

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

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.

Primary database model

Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.66
Rank	#92	Overall
	#15	Key-value stores
	#6	Wide column stores

Score	3.62
Rank	#71	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	2.56
Rank	#97	Overall
	#50	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/bigtable

cloud.google.com/datastore

cloud.google.com/spanner

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

Developer

Google

Initial release

2015

2008

2017

License

Commercial or Open Source

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.

Server operating systems

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes, details here

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language (GQL)

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

APIs and other access methods

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
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

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

using Google App Engine

Triggers

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

Multi-source replication using Paxos

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

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

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

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

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