DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Kinetica vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. SQream DB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Kinetica vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. SQream DB

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.

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

a GPU-based, columnar RDBMS for big data analytics workloads

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#105	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#234	Overall
	#107	Relational DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	19.15
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	0.73
Rank	#228	Overall
	#105	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.kinetica.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

docs.sqream.com

Developer

Google

Kinetica

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

SQream Technologies

Initial release

2017

2012

2014

2017

Current release

7.1, August 2021

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

2022.1.6, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

C, C++

Scala

C++, CUDA, Haskell, Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, ANSI Standard SQL 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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

.Net
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

user defined functions in Python

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

horizontal and vertical partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Source-replica replication

yes

none

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

GPU vRAM or System RAM

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users and roles on table level

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

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