DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. RethinkDB vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. RethinkDB vs. TerarkDB

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Key-value store

Secondary database models

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	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.66
Rank	#107	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	0.08
Rank	#367	Overall
	#56	Key-value stores

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

rethinkdb.com

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

rethinkdb.com/docs

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Google

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2017

2010

2014

2009

2016

Current release

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

restricted open source version 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.

Implementation language

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

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

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

range based

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

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

atomic operations within a document possible

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

MVCC based

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 can be defined per database

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

yes

users and table-level permissions

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