Difference between Google Cloud Firestore vs Google Cloud Spanner?

Question

There seems to be an increasing overlapping and proliferation of cloud database technologies.

In order to make sense of it a comparative approach might help.

What are the exact differences between Google Cloud Firestore vs Google Cloud Spanner ?

Answer 1

Cloud Firestore is:

A flexible, NoSQL (non-relational) scalable database for mobile, web, and server development from Firebase and Google Cloud Platform.

On the other hand, Cloud Spanner:

Horizontally scalable, strongly consistent, relational database service.

So the main difference between them is that one is a non-relational database while the other is relational. Further more, Cloud Firestore is also a realtime database, which means that for every change that takes place in the database you are instantly notified.

Answer 2

Cloud Firestore is a fast, fully managed, serverless, cloud-native NoSQL document database that simplifies storing, syncing, and querying data for your mobile, web, and IoT apps at global scale. Its client libraries provide live synchronization and offline support, and its security features and integrations with Firebase and GCP accelerate building truly serverless apps. Cloud Firestore supports ACID transactions, with automatic multi-region replication and strong consistency, your data is safe and available, even when disasters strike. Cloud Firestore even allows you to run sophisticated queries against your NoSQL data without any degradation in performance.

Cloud Spanner is a service built for the cloud specifically to combine the benefits of relational database structure with non-relational horizontal scale. This service can provide petabytes of capacity and offers transactional consistency at global scale, schemas, SQL, and automatic, synchronous replication for high availability. Use cases include financial applications and inventory applications traditionally served by relational database technology.