DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

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 in-process key-value store

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Relational DBMS

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

Score	3.62
Rank	#100	Overall
	#49	Relational DBMS

Score	3.46
Rank	#102	Overall
	#18	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	120.89
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/database-technologies/berkeleydb/overview/index.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2017

1994

2014

Current release

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available

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, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

only for the SQL API

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Source-replica replication

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

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)

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

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.