DBMS > Google Cloud Datastore vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Snowflake vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Datastore vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Snowflake vs. VoltDB

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

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

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

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

Score	4.47
Rank	#76	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	1.44
Rank	#158	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/datastore

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.snowflake.com

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Google

Snowflake Computing Inc.

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2008

2017

2014

2010

Current release

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

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

Java, C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language (GQL)

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

using Google App Engine

user defined functions

Java

Triggers

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication using Paxos

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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 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

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

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)

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

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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.