DBMS > HBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. STSdb

System Properties Comparison HBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. STSdb

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Key-Value Store with special method for indexing

optimized for high performance using a special indexing method

Primary database model

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

Score	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#360	Overall
	#52	Key-value stores

Website

hbase.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.snowflake.com

spark.apache.org/sql

github.com/STSSoft/STSdb4

Technical documentation

hbase.apache.org/book.html

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

STS Soft SC

Initial release

2008

2010

2014

2011

Current release

2.3.4, January 2021

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

4.0.8, September 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPLv2, commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

Erlang

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Data scheme

schema-free, schema definition possible

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

options to bring your own types, AVRO

yes

primitive types and user defined types (classes)

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

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

.NET Client API

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

C#
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Coprocessors in Java

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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

User concepts

Access control

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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