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

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

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

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.

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

A scalable, reliable search and analytics service in the cloud, built on RocksDB

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS
Search engine

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	0.82
Rank	#212	Overall
	#36	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

hive.apache.org

rockset.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

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

docs.rockset.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

Apache Software Foundation

initially developed by Facebook

Rockset

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2017

2012

2019

2014

Current release

3.1.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

dynamic typing

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.

ingestion from XML files supported

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Read-only SQL queries, including JOINs

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 REST

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java
PHP
Python

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

selectable replication factor

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.

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

Access rights for users and organizations can be defined via Rockset console

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

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.