DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Oracle vs. PostGIS

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Oracle vs. PostGIS

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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.

Widely used RDBMS

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.56
Rank	#97	Overall
	#50	Relational DBMS

Score	1226.57
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	18.94
Rank	#30	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.oracle.com/database

postgis.net

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.oracle.com/en/database

postgis.net/documentation

Developer

Google

Oracle

Initial release

2017

1980

2005

Current release

23c, September 2023

3.4.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL v2.0

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 and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Data scheme

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

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

with proprietary extensions

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

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

yes

based on PostgreSQL

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

based on PostgreSQL

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

can be realized in PL/SQL

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

isolation level can be parameterized

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

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

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

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

DB-Engines shares Q1 2025 database industry rankings and top climbers: Snowflake and PostgreSQL trending
1 May 2025, DB-Engines

MySQL is the DBMS of the Year 2019
3 January 2020, Matthias Gelbmann, Paul Andlinger

The struggle for the hegemony in Oracle's database empire
2 May 2017, Paul Andlinger

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Spatial database management systems
6 April 2021, Matthias Gelbmann

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Recent citations in the news

Google Cloud Introduces HDD Tier for Spanner Database, Cutting Cold Storage Costs by 80%
22 March 2025, infoq.com

New features make Google's Spanner a database for AI
1 August 2024, TechTarget

Google Cloud adds graph processing to Spanner, SQL support to Bigtable
1 August 2024, InfoWorld

Google Cloud adds graph and vector search features to Spanner database
2 August 2024, techzine.eu

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