Amazon DynamoDB vs Azure Cosmos DB vs Google Cloud Datastore

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Amazon DynamoDB

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Azure Cosmos DB

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Google Cloud Datastore

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Amazon DynamoDB vs Azure Cosmos DB vs Google Cloud Datastore: What are the differences?

Comparison of Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, and Google Cloud Datastore

Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, and Google Cloud Datastore are three popular NoSQL databases used for storage and retrieval of data in a scalable and efficient manner. Each of these databases has its unique features and capabilities that cater to different use cases. In this comparison, we will highlight the key differences between Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, and Google Cloud Datastore in terms of performance, scalability, and pricing.

  1. Data Model: Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that offers flexible data model options for developers to choose from. Azure Cosmos DB, on the other hand, supports multiple data models including document, key-value, graph, and column-family. Google Cloud Datastore primarily uses a document data model for storing data.

  2. Consistency Levels: Azure Cosmos DB provides tunable consistency levels, allowing users to choose between strong, bounded staleness, session, consistent prefix, and eventual consistency. Amazon DynamoDB offers eventual consistency and strong consistency options. Google Cloud Datastore ensures strong consistency for strongly consistent reads and eventual consistency for all other reads.

  3. Global Distribution: Azure Cosmos DB offers global distribution with multiple consistency models across regions. Amazon DynamoDB supports global tables for replication across multiple AWS Regions. Google Cloud Datastore provides automatic multi-region replication with strong consistency.

  4. Scalability: Amazon DynamoDB scales horizontally by adding more read and write capacity units. Azure Cosmos DB offers horizontal scaling with partitioning based on the data size and throughput. Google Cloud Datastore automatically scales based on the load and stores data in a distributed manner.

  5. Pricing Model: Amazon DynamoDB pricing is based on provisioned throughput capacity, storage, and data transfer. Azure Cosmos DB pricing includes throughput, storage, and data transfer costs. Google Cloud Datastore pricing is based on storage, operations, and network egress.

  6. Secondary Indexes: Amazon DynamoDB supports secondary indexes for querying data efficiently. Azure Cosmos DB offers automatic indexing with support for multiple types of indexes. Google Cloud Datastore provides indexing for properties of entities to enable efficient queries.

In Summary, Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, and Google Cloud Datastore differ in terms of data model support, consistency levels, global distribution, scalability, pricing model, and secondary index capabilities.

Advice on Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, and Google Cloud Datastore

We are building a social media app, where users will post images, like their post, and make friends based on their interest. We are currently using Cloud Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database. We are looking for another database like Amazon DynamoDB; how much this decision can be efficient in terms of pricing and overhead?

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Replies (1)
William Frank
Data Science and Engineering at GeistM · | 2 upvotes · 112.7K views
Recommends

Hi, Akash,

I wouldn't make this decision without lots more information. Cloud Firestore has a much richer metamodel (document-oriented) than Dynamo (key-value), and Dynamo seems to be particularly restrictive. That is why it is so fast. There are many needs in most applications to get lightning access to the members of a set, one set at a time. Dynamo DB is a great choice. But, social media applications generally need to be able to make long traverses across a graph. While you can make almost any metamodel act like another one, with your own custom layers on top of it, or just by writing a lot more code, it's a long way around to do that with simple key-value sets. It's hard enough to traverse across networks of collections in a document-oriented database. So, if you are moving, I think a graph-oriented database like Amazon Neptune, or, if you might want built-in reasoning, Allegro or Ontotext, would take the least programming, which is where the most cost and bugs can be avoided. Also, managed systems are also less costly in terms of people's time and system errors. It's easier to measure the costs of managed systems, so they are often seen as more costly.

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Decisions about Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, and Google Cloud Datastore
Eduardo Fernandez
Software Engineer at Parrot Software, Inc. · | 5 upvotes · 12.9K views

CouchDB has proven us to be a reliable multi-master NoSQL JSON database built natively for the web.

We decided to use it over alternatives such as Firebase due topology, costs and frontend architecture.

Thanks to CouchDB we are now a frontend first CRM platform. We are capable of delivering and leveraging our frontend code to build most of our new functionalities directly within the frontend which we enrich through backend sidecars connected to each Parrot and each CouchDB.

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Pros of Amazon DynamoDB
Pros of Azure Cosmos DB
Pros of Google Cloud Datastore
  • 62
    Predictable performance and cost
  • 56
    Scalable
  • 35
    Native JSON Support
  • 21
    AWS Free Tier
  • 7
    Fast
  • 3
    No sql
  • 3
    To store data
  • 2
    Serverless
  • 2
    No Stored procedures is GOOD
  • 1
    ORM with DynamoDBMapper
  • 1
    Elastic Scalability using on-demand mode
  • 1
    Elastic Scalability using autoscaling
  • 1
    DynamoDB Stream
  • 28
    Best-of-breed NoSQL features
  • 22
    High scalability
  • 15
    Globally distributed
  • 14
    Automatic indexing over flexible json data model
  • 10
    Tunable consistency
  • 10
    Always on with 99.99% availability sla
  • 7
    Javascript language integrated transactions and queries
  • 6
    Predictable performance
  • 5
    High performance
  • 5
    Analytics Store
  • 2
    Rapid Development
  • 2
    No Sql
  • 2
    Auto Indexing
  • 2
    Ease of use
  • 7
    High scalability
  • 2
    Serverless
  • 2
    Ability to query any property
  • 1
    Pay for what you use

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Cons of Amazon DynamoDB
Cons of Azure Cosmos DB
Cons of Google Cloud Datastore
  • 4
    Only sequential access for paginate data
  • 1
    Scaling
  • 1
    Document Limit Size
  • 18
    Pricing
  • 4
    Poor No SQL query support
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    What is Amazon DynamoDB?

    With it , you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

    What is Azure Cosmos DB?

    Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service built for fast and predictable performance, high availability, elastic scaling, global distribution, and ease of development.

    What is Google Cloud Datastore?

    Use a managed, NoSQL, schemaless database for storing non-relational data. Cloud Datastore automatically scales as you need it and supports transactions as well as robust, SQL-like queries.

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    What companies use Google Cloud Datastore?

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    What tools integrate with Azure Cosmos DB?
    What tools integrate with Google Cloud Datastore?

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    What are some alternatives to Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, and Google Cloud Datastore?
    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.
    Amazon SimpleDB
    Developers simply store and query data items via web services requests and Amazon SimpleDB does the rest. Behind the scenes, Amazon SimpleDB creates and manages multiple geographically distributed replicas of your data automatically to enable high availability and data durability. Amazon SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Your data is automatically indexed, making it easy to quickly find the information that you need. There is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later. And scale-out is as simple as creating new domains, rather than building out new servers.
    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.
    Amazon S3
    Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web
    Amazon Redshift
    It is optimized for data sets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.
    See all alternatives