DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Realm vs. SQLite vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Realm vs. SQLite vs. Weaviate

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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.

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

realm.io

www.sqlite.org

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

realm.io/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Google

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2017

2014

2000

2019

Current release

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

GraphQL is used as query language

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

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

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

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

Change Listeners

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

none

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

Eventual 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

via file-system locks

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

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

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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