DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Lovefield vs. Memcached

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Lovefield vs. Memcached

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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.

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

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

Score	2.56
Rank	#97	Overall
	#50	Relational DBMS

Score	0.13
Rank	#338	Overall
	#149	Relational DBMS

Score	15.47
Rank	#34	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

google.github.io/lovefield

www.memcached.org

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

Developer

Google

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Initial release

2017

2014

2003

Current release

2.1.12, February 2017

1.6.29, June 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

BSD license

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

JavaScript

Server operating systems

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

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

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript

.Net
C
C++
ColdFusion
Erlang
Java
Lisp
Lua
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Triggers

Using read-only observers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

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

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

using MemoryDB

User concepts

Access control

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

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

More information provided by the system vendor

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Related products and services

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Redis extends the lead in the DB-Engines key-value store ranking
3 February 2014, Matthias Gelbmann

New DB-Engines Ranking shows the popularity of database management systems
3 October 2012, 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

GCC 15 Compiler Demonstrating Measurable Performance Gains For AMD EPYC Turin
1 May 2025, Phoronix

Cache vs. Database: Has Performance Converged?
6 November 2024, The New Stack

Use Memcached for Java enterprise performance, Part 1: Architecture and setup
9 July 2024, InfoWorld

Memcrashed - Major amplification attacks from UDP port 11211
27 February 2018, The Cloudflare Blog

WordPress Memcached: What It Is and How to Use It
17 August 2023, Themeisle

provided by Google News

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