DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Postgres-XL vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Postgres-XL vs. RethinkDB

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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.

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

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#105	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	0.52
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#106	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.postgres-xl.org

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

Google

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2017

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2009

Current release

10 R1, October 2018

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

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

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

range based

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

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

MVCC

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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.

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

users and table-level permissions

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Meet some database management systems you are likely to hear more about in the future
4 August 2014, Paul Andlinger

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Recent citations in the news

Google Improves Cloud Spanner: More Compute and Storage without Price Increase
14 October 2023, InfoQ.com

Google makes its Cloud Spanner database service faster and more cost-efficient
11 October 2023, SiliconANGLE News

Google turns up the heat on AWS, claims Cloud Spanner is half the cost of DynamoDB
11 October 2023, TechCrunch

Google Spanner: When Do You Need to Move to It?
11 September 2023, hackernoon.com

Google Cloud Spanner competes directly with Amazon DynamoDB
12 October 2023, Techzine Europe

provided by Google News

An introduction to building realtime apps with RethinkDB
9 July 2022, devm.io

Stripe acquires team behind NoSQL database startup RethinkDB
5 October 2016, VentureBeat

Realtime App Development with RethinkDB and React Native — SitePoint
17 June 2016, SitePoint

MongoDB: The Popular Database for IoT
15 August 2023, Open Source For You

RethinkDB is dead, and MongoDB isn't what killed it
24 January 2017, TechRepublic

provided by Google News

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