DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. NSDb vs. RethinkDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. NSDb vs. RethinkDB vs. Snowflake

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.

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.74
Rank	#105	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

nsdb.io

rethinkdb.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

nsdb.io/Architecture

rethinkdb.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

Microsoft

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2017

2014

2017

2009

2014

Current release

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

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

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Java
Scala

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

JavaScript

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

range based

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

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

Eventual Consistency

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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Atomic single-document operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Using Apache Lucene

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)

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

yes

users and table-level permissions

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

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