Google Cloud Bigtable vs PostGIS

Google Cloud Bigtable vs PostGIS: What are the differences?

Google Cloud Bigtable: The same database that powers Google Search, Gmail and Analytics. Google Cloud Bigtable offers you a fast, fully managed, massively scalable NoSQL database service that's ideal for web, mobile, and Internet of Things applications requiring terabytes to petabytes of data. Unlike comparable market offerings, Cloud Bigtable doesn't require you to sacrifice speed, scale, or cost efficiency when your applications grow. Cloud Bigtable has been battle-tested at Google for more than 10 years—it's the database driving major applications such as Google Analytics and Gmail; PostGIS: Open source spatial database. PostGIS is a spatial database extender for PostgreSQL object-relational database. It adds support for geographic objects allowing location queries to be run in SQL.

Google Cloud Bigtable belongs to "NoSQL Database as a Service" category of the tech stack, while PostGIS can be primarily classified under "Database Tools".

Some of the features offered by Google Cloud Bigtable are:

• Unmatched Performance: Single-digit millisecond latency and over 2X the performance per dollar of unmanaged NoSQL alternatives.
• Open Source Interface: Because Cloud Bigtable is accessed through the HBase API, it is natively integrated with much of the existing big data and Hadoop ecosystem and supports Google’s big data products. Additionally, data can be imported from or exported to existing HBase clusters through simple bulk ingestion tools using industry-standard formats.
• Low Cost: By providing a fully managed service and exceptional efficiency, Cloud Bigtable’s total cost of ownership is less than half the cost of its direct competition.

On the other hand, PostGIS provides the following key features:

• Processing and analytic functions for both vector and raster data for splicing, dicing, morphing, reclassifying, and collecting/unioning with the power of SQL
• raster map algebra for fine-grained raster processing
• Spatial reprojection SQL callable functions for both vector and raster data

"High performance" is the top reason why over 5 developers like Google Cloud Bigtable, while over 22 developers mention "De facto GIS in SQL" as the leading cause for choosing PostGIS.

PostGIS is an open source tool with 645 GitHub stars and 246 GitHub forks. Here's a link to PostGIS's open source repository on GitHub.

HotelTonight, Key Location, and Kalibrr are some of the popular companies that use PostGIS, whereas Google Cloud Bigtable is used by Spotify, Rainist, and Resultados Digitais. PostGIS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 53 company stacks & 14 developers stacks; compared to Google Cloud Bigtable, which is listed in 17 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.