DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. MariaDB vs. MaxDB vs. NCache vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. MariaDB vs. MaxDB vs. NCache vs. Sphinx

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.

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.

A robust and reliable RDBMS optimized to run all major SAP solutions

Open-Source and Enterprise in-memory Key-Value Store

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Search engine

Using distributed Lucene

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	2.32
Rank	#112	Overall
	#55	Relational DBMS

Score	0.94
Rank	#195	Overall
	#29	Key-value stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

maxdb.sap.com

www.alachisoft.com/ncache

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

maxdb.sap.com/documentation

www.alachisoft.com/resources/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Google

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

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

SAP, acquired from Software AG (Adabas-D) in 1997

Alachisoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2017

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

1984

2005

2001

Current release

11.3.2, February 2024

7.9.10.12, February 2024

5.3.3, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

Limited community edition free

Open Source

Enterprise Edition available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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++

C#, .NET, .NET Core, Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

partial

Supported data types are Lists, Queues, Hashsets, Dictionary and Counter

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

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL-like query syntax and LINQ for searching the cache. Cache Synchronization with SQL Server using SQL dependency.

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
WebDAV

IDistributedCache
JCache
LINQ
Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol

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#
Java
Perl
PHP
Python

.Net
.Net Core
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

support for stored procedures with SQL-Server CLR

Triggers

yes

Notifications

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

none

yes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

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

yes, with selectable consistency level

none

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
Strong Eventual Consistency over WAN with Conflict Resolution using Bridge Topology

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

optimistic locking and pessimistic locking

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

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

Authentication to access the cache via Active Directory/LDAP (possible roles: user, administrator)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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NCache has been the market leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005 . NCache...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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NCache is 100% .NET/ .NET Core based which fully supports ASP.NET Core Sessions ,...
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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NCache enables industries like retail, finance, banking IoT, travel, ecommerce, healthcare...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Bank of America, Citi, Natures Way, Charter Spectrum, Barclays, Henry Schein, GBM,...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Market Leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005.
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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NCache Open Source is free on an as-is basis without any support. NCache Enterprise...
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