DBMS > Google Cloud Datastore vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Lovefield vs. Snowflake vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Datastore vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Lovefield vs. Snowflake vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

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

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store

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

Score	4.47
Rank	#76	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	0.29
Rank	#293	Overall
	#133	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

cloud.google.com/datastore

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

google.github.io/lovefield

www.snowflake.com

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Google

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Google

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2008

2010

2014

2019

Current release

2.1.12, February 2017

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

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

JavaScript

Clojure

Server operating systems

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

hosted

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes, details here

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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)

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

yes

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

JavaScript

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

using Google App Engine

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes

Using read-only observers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication using Paxos

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

yes, each node contains all data

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 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.

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

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

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

using MemoryDB

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

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

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