DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Memcached vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. mSQL

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Memcached vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. mSQL

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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.

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	19.42
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	1.27
Rank	#167	Overall
	#77	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.memcached.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

Google

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Microsoft

Hughes Technologies

Initial release

2017

2003

2014

1994

Current release

1.6.25, March 2024

4.4, October 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

BSD license

commercial

free licenses can be provided

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

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

no subqueries, aggregate functions, views, foreign keys, triggers

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

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

Triggers

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

none

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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.

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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