DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. NuoDB vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. NuoDB vs. SwayDB

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.

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	0.89
Rank	#198	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#382	Overall
	#59	Key-value stores

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.h2database.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

doc.nuodb.com

Developer

Google

Thomas Mueller

Microsoft

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2017

2005

2014

2013

2018

Current release

2.2.220, July 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

commercial

limited edition free

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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++

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

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

JDBC
ODBC

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

JavaScript

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

tunable commit protocol

Atomic execution of operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

MVCC

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

Temporary table

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

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