DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Hive vs. HyperSQL vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Hive vs. HyperSQL vs. Snowflake

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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.

data warehouse software for querying and managing large distributed datasets, built on Hadoop

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	59.76
Rank	#18	Overall
	#12	Relational DBMS

Score	3.23
Rank	#93	Overall
	#48	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

hive.apache.org

hsqldb.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/Home

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

Apache Software Foundation

initially developed by Facebook

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2017

2012

2001

2014

Current release

3.1.3, April 2022

2.7.2, June 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

based on BSD license

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

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Embedded (into Java applications) and Client-Server operating modes

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

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

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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
Thrift

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java
PHP
Python

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

Java, SQL

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

selectable replication factor

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

query execution via MapReduce

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

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

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 rights for users, groups and roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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