DBMS > Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Riak KV vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Riak KV vs. VoltDB

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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.

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

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

Relational DBMS

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

Score	3.58
Rank	#92	Overall
	#14	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#105	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	4.44
Rank	#80	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	1.46
Rank	#159	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/bigtable

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

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

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Google

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2015

2017

2009

2010

Current release

3.2.0, December 2022

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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

Java, C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

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

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Erlang

Java

Triggers

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

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 with 3 replicas for regional instances.

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

links between data sets can be stored

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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)

yes, using Riak Security

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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