DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. PlanetScale vs. Vitess

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. PlanetScale vs. Vitess

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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.

Scalable, distributed, serverless MySQL database platform built on top of Vitess

Scalable, distributed, cloud-native DBMS, extending MySQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.56
Rank	#97	Overall
	#50	Relational DBMS

Score	1.05
Rank	#180	Overall
	#80	Relational DBMS

Score	0.99
Rank	#185	Overall
	#84	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

planetscale.com

vitess.io

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

planetscale.com/docs

vitess.io/docs

Developer

Google

PlanetScale

The Linux Foundation, PlanetScale

Initial release

2017

2020

2013

Current release

15.0.2, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0, commercial licenses available

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

Server operating systems

hosted

Docker
Linux
macOS

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

with proprietary extensions

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
MySQL protocol
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

proprietary syntax

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

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

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

Eventual Consistency across shards
Immediate Consistency within a shard

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID at shard level

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

no user groups or roles

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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More resources

Recent citations in the news

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22 March 2025, infoq.com

New features make Google's Spanner a database for AI
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Google Cloud Spanner gets dual-region configuration option
23 July 2024, InfoWorld

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1 August 2024, TechCrunch

Google Releases Spanner Graph into General Availability
19 February 2025, infoq.com

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11 March 2024, theregister.com

PlanetScale Announces $30M Series B Funding to Accelerate Adoption of Instantly Provisioned and Infinitely Scalable Database
23 June 2021, Business Wire

PlanetScale raises $50M Series C as its enterprise database service hits general availability
16 November 2021, TechCrunch

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26 July 2022, Cloud Native Now

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23 June 2021, Business Wire

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