DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. PouchDB vs. Realm vs. RethinkDB vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. PouchDB vs. Realm vs. RethinkDB vs. SQLite

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.

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	2.28
Rank	#115	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	2.74
Rank	#105	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

pouchdb.com/guides

realm.io/docs

rethinkdb.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Google

Apache Software Foundation

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2017

2012

2014

2009

2000

Current release

7.1.1, June 2019

2.4.1, August 2020

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Public Domain

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

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

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

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

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

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

Change Listeners

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

none

Sharding

range based

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

none

Source-replica replication

none

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

Eventual Consistency

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

Atomic single-document operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

In-Memory realm

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

yes

users and table-level permissions

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