DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. H2 vs. PostgreSQL vs. RavenDB vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. H2 vs. PostgreSQL vs. RavenDB vs. VoltDB

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.

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

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

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series 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	645.54
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	2.92
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	1.44
Rank	#158	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

www.postgresql.org/docs

ravendb.net/docs

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Google

Thomas Mueller

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Hibernating Rhinos

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2017

2005

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2010

Current release

2.2.220, July 2023

16.3, May 2024

5.4, July 2022

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

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

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

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.

Aiven for PostgreSQL: Fully managed PostgreSQL for developers with 70+ extensions and flexible orchestration tools.

Implementation language

Java

Java, C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

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

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

standard with numerous extensions

SQL-like query language (RQL)

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

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

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

yes

Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

Sharding

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

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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.

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

Authorization levels configured per client per database

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.

Related products and services

3rd parties

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More resources

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Conferences, events and webinars

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Monitoring PostgreSQL with Redgate Monitor
Webinar, 10-11am CT / 4-5pm BST, 22 May 2024

Recent citations in the news

Google Improves Cloud Spanner: More Compute and Storage without Price Increase
14 October 2023, InfoQ.com

Google makes its Cloud Spanner database service faster and more cost-efficient
11 October 2023, SiliconANGLE News

Google turns up the heat on AWS, claims Cloud Spanner is half the cost of DynamoDB
11 October 2023, TechCrunch

Google Spanner: When Do You Need to Move to It?
11 September 2023, hackernoon.com

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First Principles: Optimizing PostgreSQL for the cloud
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1 May 2024, The New Stack

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13 March 2024, Microsoft

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RavenDB Launches Version 6.0 Lightning Fast Queries, Data Integrations, Corax Indexing Engine, and Sharding
3 October 2023, PR Newswire

RavenDB Welcomes David Baruc as Chief Revenue Officer: Seasoned Tech Leader to Drive Global Sales and ...
13 June 2023, PR Newswire

Install the NoSQL RavenDB Data System
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RavenDB Adds Graph Queries
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How I Created a RavenDB Python Client
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16 October 2023, YourStory

VoltDB Launches Active(N) Lossless Cross Data Center Replication
31 August 2021, PR Newswire

VoltDB Turns to Real-Time Analytics with NewSQL Database
30 January 2014, Datanami

VoltDB Upgrades Power, Security of Its In-Memory Database
1 February 2017, eWeek

VoltDB Aims for Fast Big Data Development -- ADTmag
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