Amazon SimpleDB vs Google Cloud Datastore: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the world of databases, Amazon SimpleDB and Google Cloud Datastore are two popular choices. Although they serve the same purpose of providing scalable, highly available, and managed NoSQL database solutions, there are several key differences between the two.

1. Data Model: Amazon SimpleDB is based on a schema-less data model, which allows for flexible data storage and retrieval without predefined table schemas. On the other hand, Google Cloud Datastore uses a structured data model where entities are defined by their kind and properties. This allows for more structured and organized data storage.

2. Scalability: While both Amazon SimpleDB and Google Cloud Datastore offer scalability, they differ in their approach. SimpleDB automatically scales its underlying infrastructure to handle a high volume of requests, but it may experience higher latency during peak loads. On the contrary, Google Cloud Datastore is designed to handle massive scalability by sharding data across multiple servers, providing low-latency performance even during high traffic.

3. Querying Capabilities: Amazon SimpleDB supports limited querying capabilities, primarily allowing for simple queries on attribute values. On the other hand, Google Cloud Datastore offers more advanced querying options, including filtering, sorting, and joining multiple entities based on their properties, providing a more powerful and flexible querying experience.

4. Transactions and Consistency: Google Cloud Datastore has built-in support for transactional operations, allowing multiple operations to be executed atomically. It also provides strong consistency guarantees by default, ensuring that queries always return the most up-to-date data. Amazon SimpleDB, on the other hand, does not offer built-in support for transactions and provides eventual consistency, which means that changes may take some time to propagate through the system.

5. Associated Services: Both Amazon SimpleDB and Google Cloud Datastore are part of a larger ecosystem of cloud services. However, SimpleDB is tightly integrated with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings, such as Amazon S3 for storing large objects and Amazon EC2 for running applications, providing a seamless experience for building applications within the AWS environment. Google Cloud Datastore, on the other hand, is part of the Google Cloud Platform, which offers a wide range of services, such as BigQuery for data analytics and App Engine for deploying applications.

6. Pricing Model: The pricing models of Amazon SimpleDB and Google Cloud Datastore differ in terms of their billing units and cost structures. SimpleDB charges based on the amount of data transferred in and out of the service, as well as storage and request costs. Google Cloud Datastore, on the other hand, charges based on the number of entity reads and writes, as well as storage costs. It's important to review the pricing details of each service to determine which aligns better with your application's requirements and usage patterns.

In Summary, Amazon SimpleDB and Google Cloud Datastore differ in their data models, scalability approaches, querying capabilities, transactions and consistency, associated services, and pricing models.