DBMS > Google Cloud Bigtable vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Realm vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Bigtable vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Realm vs. Snowflake

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

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.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

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

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	3.26
Rank	#92	Overall
	#13	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/bigtable

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

realm.io

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

realm.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2015

2010

2014

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

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.

Implementation language

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Change Listeners

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

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
Source-replica replication

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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)

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic single-row operations

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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.

yes

In-Memory realm

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

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

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.