DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. GridGain vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Weaviate vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. GridGain vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Weaviate vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	1.55
Rank	#150	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#70	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.gridgain.com

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

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

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

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

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

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Google

GridGain Systems, Inc.

Microsoft

Weaviate B.V.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2017

2007

1989

2019

Current release

GridGain 8.5.1

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

1.19, May 2023

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java, C++, .Net

C++

Clojure

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

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

Data scheme

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

GraphQL is used as query language

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

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

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

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

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

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

Triggers

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

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

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes (replicated cache)

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

User concepts

Access control

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

Security Hooks for custom implementations

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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