DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. TerminusDB vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. TerminusDB vs. Virtuoso

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

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 Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	0.17
Rank	#325	Overall
	#29	Graph DBMS

Score	4.26
Rank	#78	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#42	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

terminusdb.com

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Google

DataChemist Ltd.

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2017

2018

1998

Current release

11.0.0, January 2023

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license 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

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

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

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript
Python

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Graph Partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Journaling Streams

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

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)

Role-based access control

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
» more

Competitive advantages

Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
» more

Key customers

Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
» more

Market metrics

Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
» more

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

We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

More resources

Recent citations in the news

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

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

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

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

More AI Added to Google Cloud's Databases
28 February 2024, Datanami

provided by Google News

How TerminusDB is commercializing its open source graph database
16 March 2021, VentureBeat

TerminusDB Takes on Data Collaboration with a git-Like Approach
1 December 2020, The New Stack

Dublin-based data collaboration tool TerminusDB raises €3.6 million in seed round
15 March 2021, Tech.eu

Trinity College spinout TerminusDB secures €3.6m in investment
15 March 2021, The Irish Times

[MCR2030-CAMS-ARISE-UNDRR Webinar] Preventing cascading failures of critical assets: Using the Open-Source ...
12 April 2022, United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction

provided by Google News

Share this page