DBMS > Google Cloud Firestore vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. searchxml vs. SpaceTime

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Firestore vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. searchxml vs. SpaceTime

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

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.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

DBMS for structured and unstructured content wrapped with an application server

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Native XML DBMS
Search engine

Spatial DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Native XML DBMS
	#25	Search engines

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.searchxml.net/category/products

www.mireo.com/spacetime

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

www.searchxml.net/support/handouts

Developer

Google

Microsoft

informationpartners gmbh

Mireo

Initial release

2017

1989

2015

2020

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

1.0

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

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

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Windows

Linux

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

APIs and other access methods

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

RESTful HTTP API
WebDAV
XQuery
XSLT

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

C++

most other programming languages supported via APIs

C#
C++
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

on the application server

Triggers

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

none

Fixed-grid hypercubes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

sychronisation to multiple collections

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

multiple readers, single writer

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Domain, group and role-based access control at the document level and for application services

yes

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