DBMS > Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. NSDb vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. NSDb vs. Snowflake

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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.

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

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

Primary database model

Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	3.15
Rank	#95	Overall
	#14	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#369	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/bigtable

cloud.google.com/spanner

nsdb.io

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

nsdb.io/Architecture

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2015

2017

2014

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

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 with 3 replicas for regional instances.

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

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

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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.

User concepts

Access control

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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