Amazon Athena vs. Google Cloud Spanner

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Athena
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Athena at their data stored in S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to setup or manage, and customers pay only for the queries they run. You can use Athena to process logs, perform ad-hoc analysis, and run…
$5
per TB of Data Scanned
Google Cloud Spanner
Score 6.3 out of 10
N/A
Google Cloud Spanner is a cloud database-as-a-service product offered as a service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).N/A
Pricing
Amazon AthenaGoogle Cloud Spanner
Editions & Modules
Price per Query
$5.00
per TB of Data Scanned
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon AthenaGoogle Cloud Spanner
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon AthenaGoogle Cloud Spanner
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon AthenaGoogle Cloud Spanner
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Athena
8.5
3 Ratings
3% below category average
Google Cloud Spanner
7.8
2 Ratings
11% below category average
Automatic software patching8.22 Ratings8.82 Ratings
Database scalability8.22 Ratings8.82 Ratings
Automated backups7.73 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Database security provisions9.22 Ratings5.82 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics8.83 Ratings5.82 Ratings
Automatic host deployment9.22 Ratings7.62 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon AthenaGoogle Cloud Spanner
Small Businesses
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.8 out of 10
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.8 out of 10
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.8 out of 10
Enterprises
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.8 out of 10
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon AthenaGoogle Cloud Spanner
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(3 ratings)
7.4
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon AthenaGoogle Cloud Spanner
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
If you are looking to take a lot of the traditional "database administration" work off someone's plate, going with Amazon Athena certainly has "no code" options to optimize lots of database tasks. I would say this option is less appropriate if you have other Microsoft things at play, such as Power BI.
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Google
Google Cloud Spanner is suited for limitless horizontal scaling while maintaining strong consistency which needs to support ACID. NoSQL databases work in scaling but no ACID support. RDBMS support ACID, but horizontal scaling is not as great. The API it provides result in some limitations to related areas of the code, such as connection pools or database linking framework. So high # of connection pools can vary.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Nested Schemas like JSON data structure
  • Ability to adapt the data model to fit your queries better
  • Performance Improvement
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Google
  • Super high availability
  • Scales automatically
  • High standard SLA
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Query manager can incoperate GUI based query designer
  • Auto-completion engine sometimes overwrite the query
  • Time range selection should be implicit
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Google
  • Support for Views
  • Support for more databases (schemas).
  • More index types that can be supported (Functional)
  • Backups (ie table/data backup) if data is deleted or truncate by accident.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Amazon Athena, a product from Amazon, competes with offerings from Google and Microsoft. Overall, I think your database choice depends on some of the other applications you are running at your company. For example, if you are using Microsoft Power BI for reporting needs, you might want to consider going the Azure route.
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Google
At that point, we were looking at something [that] can hold our relational database, [...] provide stable connection, and maintain high ACID transition. BigTable is for nonrelational database so it was out of our [sight] very quickly. BigQuery is a data warehouse that can hold huge amount of data but not ideal for transition. AWS RDS is [...] similar to Spanner but because most of our services are already on GCP, so we went with Spanner.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Easy to query terabytes of data with faster response
  • Pricing model is also cheap
  • No indexing and partitioning
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Google
  • Backups specifically if transactional data is deleted. Restoring made us lose time.
  • Sharding on Horizontal level was quick and easy. Deployment and increasing nodes is easy
  • Large dataset handling.
  • ACID compliance
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