DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Snowflake

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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.

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.69
Rank	#101	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	72.95
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	18.98
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2017

2010

2016

2014

Current release

V12

License

Commercial or Open Source

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
PHP

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes, with always 3 replicas available

yes

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

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

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.

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

yes

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

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