DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Db2 warehouse vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Db2 warehouse vs. Snowflake

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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.

Cloud-based data warehousing service

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	2.56
Rank	#97	Overall
	#50	Relational DBMS

Score	1.22
Rank	#163	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Score	172.01
Rank	#6	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.ibm.com/products/db2/warehouse

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

IBM

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2017

2014

License

Commercial or Open Source

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.

Server operating systems

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

yes

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

.NET Client API
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PL/SQL, SQL PL

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

DB-Engines shares Q1 2025 database industry rankings and top climbers: Snowflake and PostgreSQL trending
1 May 2025, DB-Engines

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16 January 2025, Tom Russell

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3 January 2023, Matthias Gelbmann, Paul Andlinger

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Recent citations in the news

Google Cloud Introduces HDD Tier for Spanner Database, Cutting Cold Storage Costs by 80%
22 March 2025, infoq.com

New features make Google's Spanner a database for AI
1 August 2024, TechTarget

Google Cloud Spanner gets dual-region configuration option
23 July 2024, InfoWorld

Google Cloud adds graph and vector search features to Spanner database
2 August 2024, techzine.eu

Google Releases Spanner Graph into General Availability
19 February 2025, infoq.com

provided by Google News

Announcing IBM Db2 and Db2 Warehouse SaaS on Azure
5 May 2025, IBM

IBM Extends BYOC Deployment Model for Netezza and Db2 SaaS Across AWS and Azure
5 May 2025, ChannelE2E

IBM Db2 12.1.1.0 has arrived: What’s new and improved?
5 February 2025, IBM

The 10 Best Cloud Data Warehouse Solutions to Consider in 2025
1 January 2025, solutionsreview.com

A major upgrade to Db2® Warehouse on IBM Cloud®
26 June 2024, IBM

provided by Google News

Snowflake for Applications & Collaboration | AI Data Cloud
10 April 2025, snowflake.com

Snowflake Challenger ClickHouse Targets $6 Billion Valuation
9 May 2025, The Information

Breaking Silos: Integrating Snowflake and Oracle Autonomous Database with Iceberg Tables
22 January 2025, Oracle Blogs

Snowflake for Data Lakes
17 February 2025, snowflake.com

Build End-to-End Pipelines in Python with Snowflake
7 May 2025, snowflake.com

provided by Google News

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