DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Pinecone vs. Snowflake vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Pinecone vs. Snowflake vs. TimesTen

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

A managed, cloud-native vector database

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

An in-memory SQL relational database that delivers microsecond response and high throughput for OLTP applications. TimesTen can be deployed as a standalone database or as a cache to a backend Oracle database.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

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	3.02
Rank	#87	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	1.26
Rank	#164	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

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

www.pinecone.io

www.snowflake.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

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

docs.pinecone.io/docs/overview

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/timesten/index.html

Developer

Google

Microsoft

Pinecone Systems, Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Oracle

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2017

2010

2019

2014

1998

Current release

V12

Release 22.1

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

IBM AIX Power PC 64-bit
Linux arm64
Linux x86-64
Solaris SPARC 64
Solaris SPARC/x86
Solaris x86-64

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

String, Number, Boolean

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

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)
Pro*C/C++ programming interfaces
SQL and PL/SQL via JDBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C++
Java
Node.js
PL/SQL
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL

user defined functions

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

none

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

In-memory capabilities

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

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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