DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Ingres vs. MariaDB vs. NuoDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Ingres vs. MariaDB vs. NuoDB vs. TimescaleDB

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.

Well established RDBMS

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.

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#82	Overall
	#44	Relational DBMS

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	0.94
Rank	#197	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.actian.com/databases/ingres

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.actian.com/ingres

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

doc.nuodb.com

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Google

Actian Corporation

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

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2017

1974

originally developed at University Berkely in early 1970s

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2013

2017

Current release

11.2, May 2022

11.3.2, February 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

limited edition free

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
HP Open VMS
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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.

but tools for importing/exporting data from/to XML-files available

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

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
proprietary protocol (OpenAPI)

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Java, SQL

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Ingres Star to access multiple databases simultaneously

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Ingres Replicator

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

tunable commit protocol

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC

yes

MVCC

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

Temporary table

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

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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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

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Licensing and pricing models

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