DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. HBase vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. STSdb

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. HBase vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. STSdb

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.

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

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

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Key-Value Store with special method for indexing

optimized for high performance using a special indexing method

Primary database model

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#360	Overall
	#52	Key-value stores

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

hbase.apache.org

www.snowflake.com

spark.apache.org/sql

github.com/STSSoft/STSdb4

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

hbase.apache.org/book.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Google

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

STS Soft SC

Initial release

2017

2008

2014

2011

Current release

2.3.4, January 2021

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

4.0.8, September 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPLv2, commercial license available

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

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free, schema definition possible

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

options to bring your own types, AVRO

yes

primitive types and user defined types (classes)

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

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

.NET Client API

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

C#
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Coprocessors in Java

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual 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

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

ACID

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 (IAM)

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

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

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