DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. PostGIS vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. PostGIS vs. TerminusDB

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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.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	22.69
Rank	#29	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Score	0.17
Rank	#325	Overall
	#29	Graph DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

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

postgis.net

terminusdb.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

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

postgis.net/documentation

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Google

Microsoft

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2017

1989

2005

2018

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.4.2, February 2024

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL v2.0

Open Source

GPL V3

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

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

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

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
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

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

yes

based on PostgreSQL

Graph Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

based on PostgreSQL

Journaling Streams

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

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

yes

based on PostgreSQL

Role-based access control

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