DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Cloudant vs. InfinityDB vs. Informix vs. MariaDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Cloudant vs. InfinityDB vs. Informix vs. MariaDB

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.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

A Java embedded Key-Value Store which extends the Java Map interface

A secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

Primary database model

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	0.08
Rank	#365	Overall
	#55	Key-value stores

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

boilerbay.com

www.ibm.com/products/informix

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

boilerbay.com/infinitydb/manual

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

Developer

Google

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Boiler Bay Inc.

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Initial release

2017

2010

2002

1984

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

Current release

4.0

14.10.FC5, November 2020

11.3.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free developer edition available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

Erlang

Java

C, C++ and Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

nested virtual Java Maps, multi-value, logical â€˜tuple spaceâ€™ runtime Schema upgrade

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

all Java primitives, Date, CLOB, BLOB, huge sparse arrays

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

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

manual creation possible, using inversions based on multi-value capability

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

with proprietary extensions

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Access via java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentNavigableMap Interface
Proprietary API to InfinityDB ItemSpace (boilerbay.com/docs/ItemSpaceDataStructures.htm)

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Java

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

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

none

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

READ-COMMITTED or SERIALIZED

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

manual creation possible, using inversions based on multi-value capability

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Optimistic locking for transactions; no isolation for bulk loads

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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