DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Postgres-XL vs. PostgreSQL vs. TimesTen vs. Trafodion

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Postgres-XL vs. PostgreSQL vs. TimesTen vs. Trafodion

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Apache Trafodion has been retired in 2021. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

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.

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Transactional SQL-on-Hadoop DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	636.25
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	1.36
Rank	#161	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.postgres-xl.org

www.postgresql.org

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

trafodion.apache.org

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

www.postgresql.org/docs

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

trafodion.apache.org/documentation.html

Developer

Google

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Apache Software Foundation, originally developed by HP

Initial release

2017

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

1998

2014

Current release

10 R1, October 2018

16.3, May 2024

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

2.3.0, February 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++, Java

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

standard with numerous 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

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/ADO.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

PL/SQL

Java Stored Procedures

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, via HBase

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

via user defined functions and HBase

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

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)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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.

Related products and services

3rd parties

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