DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. SAP HANA vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. SAP HANA 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.

A Wide Column Store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	4.48
Rank	#75	Overall
	#6	Wide column stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	44.69
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/tables

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

help.sap.com/hana

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

Microsoft

SAP

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2017

2012

1989

2010

2014

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

also available as a cloud based service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Appliance or cloud-service

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

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

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

SQLScript, R

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

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. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

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

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

optimistic locking

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights based on private key authentication or shared access signatures

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

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

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