Google Cloud Spanner vs TiDB

Overview

TiDB

Stacks76

Followers177

Votes28

GitHub Stars39.3K

Forks6.0K

Google Cloud Spanner

Stacks57

Followers117

Votes3

GitHub Stars2.0K

Forks1.1K

Google Cloud Spanner vs TiDB: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Google Cloud Spanner and TiDB are both distributed SQL databases that offer high scalability and fault tolerance. While they share some similarities, there are several key differences that set them apart.

Consistency Model: One major difference between Google Cloud Spanner and TiDB is their consistency models. Cloud Spanner provides strong external consistency, ensuring that reads and writes are globally consistent. On the other hand, TiDB offers a more relaxed consistency model based on multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), allowing for eventual consistency.
Storage Engine: Another significant difference is the storage engine used by these databases. Google Cloud Spanner uses a custom storage engine called "Colossus," which provides distributed storage and replication. In contrast, TiDB leverages the RocksDB storage engine, a popular open-source key-value store optimized for solid-state drives.
Sharding and Partitioning: Google Cloud Spanner handles sharding and partitioning internally, automatically managing data distribution across nodes. TiDB, on the other hand, requires manual configuration of sharding, giving users more control over how data is distributed and improving performance for specific use cases.
Database Architecture: Cloud Spanner follows a single-master architecture, where a single node serves as the primary coordinator for handling transactions. In contrast, TiDB adopts a distributed architecture with multiple nodes, allowing for better horizontal scalability and fault tolerance.
Distributed Transactions: Google Cloud Spanner provides distributed transactions across globally distributed databases, ensuring ACID compliance and consistency. TiDB, while also supporting distributed transactions, relies on the 2PC (Two-Phase Commit) protocol for consistency, which may incur higher latency compared to Cloud Spanner.
Integration with Ecosystem: Both Google Cloud Spanner and TiDB integrate well with cloud-native ecosystems. However, Cloud Spanner has native integration with other Google Cloud Platform services, offering seamless integration, while TiDB provides integrations with popular open-source projects, such as Apache Kafka and Spark.

**In Summary, Google Cloud Spanner offers strong external consistency, employs a custom storage engine, and has a single-master architecture, while TiDB provides a more relaxed consistency model, utilizes the RocksDB storage engine, and employs a distributed architecture. Cloud Spanner also supports distributed transactions across globally distributed databases, while TiDB offers more control over sharding and partitioning.

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Detailed Comparison

TiDB	Google Cloud Spanner
Inspired by the design of Google F1, TiDB supports the best features of both traditional RDBMS and NoSQL.	It is a globally distributed database service that gives developers a production-ready storage solution. It provides key features such as global transactions, strongly consistent reads, and automatic multi-site replication and failover.
Horizontal scalability;Asynchronous schema changes;Consistent distributed transactions;Compatible with MySQL protocol;Written in Go;NewSQL over TiKV;Multiple storage engine support	Global transactions; Strongly consistent reads; Automatic multi-site replication; Failover.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 39.3K	GitHub Stars 2.0K
GitHub Forks 6.0K	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 76	Stacks 57
Followers 177	Followers 117
Votes 28	Votes 3
Pros & Cons
Pros 9 Open source 7 Horizontal scalability 5 Strong ACID 3 HTAP 2 Enterprise Support	Pros 1 Horizontal scaling 1 Scalable 1 Strongly consistent
Integrations
No integrations available	MySQL PostgreSQL MongoDB SQLite

What are some alternatives to TiDB, Google Cloud Spanner?

MongoDB

MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.

MySQL

The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions.

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft® SQL Server is a database management and analysis system for e-commerce, line-of-business, and data warehousing solutions.

SQLite

SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file.

Cassandra

Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL.

Memcached

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

MariaDB

Started by core members of the original MySQL team, MariaDB actively works with outside developers to deliver the most featureful, stable, and sanely licensed open SQL server in the industry. MariaDB is designed as a drop-in replacement of MySQL(R) with more features, new storage engines, fewer bugs, and better performance.

RethinkDB

RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.

ArangoDB

A distributed free and open-source database with a flexible data model for documents, graphs, and key-values. Build high performance applications using a convenient SQL-like query language or JavaScript extensions.

Related Comparisons

Google Cloud Spanner vs TiDB: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Consistency Model: One major difference between Google Cloud Spanner and TiDB is their consistency models. Cloud Spanner provides strong external consistency, ensuring that reads and writes are globally consistent. On the other hand, TiDB offers a more relaxed consistency model based on multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), allowing for eventual consistency.
Storage Engine: Another significant difference is the storage engine used by these databases. Google Cloud Spanner uses a custom storage engine called "Colossus," which provides distributed storage and replication. In contrast, TiDB leverages the RocksDB storage engine, a popular open-source key-value store optimized for solid-state drives.
Sharding and Partitioning: Google Cloud Spanner handles sharding and partitioning internally, automatically managing data distribution across nodes. TiDB, on the other hand, requires manual configuration of sharding, giving users more control over how data is distributed and improving performance for specific use cases.
Database Architecture: Cloud Spanner follows a single-master architecture, where a single node serves as the primary coordinator for handling transactions. In contrast, TiDB adopts a distributed architecture with multiple nodes, allowing for better horizontal scalability and fault tolerance.
Distributed Transactions: Google Cloud Spanner provides distributed transactions across globally distributed databases, ensuring ACID compliance and consistency. TiDB, while also supporting distributed transactions, relies on the 2PC (Two-Phase Commit) protocol for consistency, which may incur higher latency compared to Cloud Spanner.
Integration with Ecosystem: Both Google Cloud Spanner and TiDB integrate well with cloud-native ecosystems. However, Cloud Spanner has native integration with other Google Cloud Platform services, offering seamless integration, while TiDB provides integrations with popular open-source projects, such as Apache Kafka and Spark.

Google Cloud Spanner vs TiDB

Overview