DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Cloudant vs. RethinkDB vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Cloudant vs. RethinkDB vs. TimesTen

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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

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

An in-memory SQL relational database that delivers microsecond response and high throughput for OLTP applications. TimesTen can be deployed as a standalone database or as a cache to a backend Oracle database.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.69
Rank	#101	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	2.85
Rank	#95	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	2.58
Rank	#105	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	1.26
Rank	#164	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

rethinkdb.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

rethinkdb.com/docs

docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/timesten/index.html

Developer

Google

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Oracle

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2017

2010

2009

1998

Current release

2.4.1, August 2020

Release 22.1

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

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

IBM AIX Power PC 64-bit
Linux arm64
Linux x86-64
Solaris SPARC 64
Solaris SPARC/x86
Solaris x86-64

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)
Pro*C/C++ programming interfaces
SQL and PL/SQL via JDBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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
C++
Java
Node.js
PL/SQL
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

Source-replica replication

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

atomic operations within a document possible

Atomic single-document operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

MVCC based

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

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

yes

users and table-level permissions

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

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