Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

PostgreSQL VS Google Cloud Bigtable

Compare PostgreSQL VS Google Cloud Bigtable and see what are their differences

PostgreSQL logo PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system.

Google Cloud Bigtable logo Google Cloud Bigtable

A high performance NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads.
  • PostgreSQL Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • Google Cloud Bigtable Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-12

PostgreSQL features and specs

  • Open Source
    PostgreSQL is an open-source database management system, which means it is free to use, modify, and distribute. This reduces the cost of database management for individuals and organizations.
  • ACID Compliance
    PostgreSQL is fully ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) compliant, ensuring reliable transactions and data integrity.
  • Extensible
    PostgreSQL is highly extensible, allowing users to add custom functions, data types, and operators. This enables tailored solutions to specific requirements.
  • Advanced SQL Features
    PostgreSQL supports advanced SQL features like full-text search, JSON and XML data types, and complex queries, providing powerful tools for database operations.
  • Community Support
    There is a strong and active community around PostgreSQL, offering extensive documentation, forums, and collaborative support, which aids troubleshooting and development.
  • Multiple Indexing Techniques
    PostgreSQL offers a variety of indexing techniques such as B-tree, GIN, GiST, and BRIN, allowing for optimized query performance on various data types.
  • Cross-Platform Availability
    PostgreSQL runs on all major operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Unix), giving flexibility in deployment and development environments.

Possible disadvantages of PostgreSQL

  • Complex Configuration
    Setting up and configuring PostgreSQL can be complex and time-consuming, especially for beginners, requiring a good understanding of its parameters and best practices.
  • Heavy Resource Consumption
    PostgreSQL can be resource-intensive, consuming significant CPU and memory compared to other database systems, which may affect performance on lower-end hardware.
  • Backup and Restore Process
    The backup and restore process in PostgreSQL is not as straightforward as in some other database systems, requiring more manual intervention and understanding of tools like pg_dump and pg_restore.
  • Replication Complexity
    While PostgreSQL supports replication, setting it up can be more complex than some other databases. Advanced configurations like multi-master replication can be particularly challenging.
  • Steeper Learning Curve
    Due to its advanced features and extensive capabilities, PostgreSQL can have a steeper learning curve, making it harder for new users to get started compared to simpler database systems.
  • Less Third-Party Tool Support
    PostgreSQL has less support from third-party tools compared to more widely adopted databases like MySQL, which can limit options for auxiliary functions like administration, monitoring, and development.

Google Cloud Bigtable features and specs

  • Scalability
    Google Cloud Bigtable is designed to scale horizontally to handle massive amounts of data across millions of rows and thousands of columns. This makes it ideal for applications needing to handle large datasets with high throughput.
  • Low Latency
    Bigtable is optimized for low-latency access to big data. It is capable of delivering real-time responses, which is beneficial for applications that require fast read and write operations.
  • Seamless Integration
    Bigtable integrates easily with other GCP services like Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Dataflow, simplifying the development of complex applications that require various cloud services.
  • Managed Service
    As a managed service, Bigtable handles routine operations such as scaling, replication, and failure recovery, allowing users to focus on application development rather than infrastructure management.
  • Strong Consistency
    Bigtable provides strong consistency for read and write operations, ensuring that data is reliable and consistent across operations and query results.

Possible disadvantages of Google Cloud Bigtable

  • Complexity of Use
    Bigtable can be complex to set up and use effectively, especially for those who are unfamiliar with NoSQL databases or distributed systems.
  • Cost
    While scalable, the pricing can become expensive as your requirements grow, especially if you need high throughput and large storage capacities.
  • Limited Querying Capabilities
    Unlike relational databases, Bigtable has limited querying capabilities. It does not support SQL-like queries, making it less suitable for applications that require complex querying options.
  • Region-Specific Availability
    Bigtable is available only in certain regions, which might limit its use for global applications requiring multi-region deployments for latency optimization.
  • Learning Curve
    There's a significant learning curve for new users to understand Bigtable's architecture and its best practices, which can delay the development process.

PostgreSQL videos

Comparison of PostgreSQL and MongoDB

More videos:

  • Review - PostgreSQL Review
  • Review - MySQL vs PostgreSQL - Why you shouldn't use MySQL

Google Cloud Bigtable videos

Scalability Meetup @ Whitepages - Google Cloud BigTable

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to PostgreSQL and Google Cloud Bigtable)
Databases
96 96%
4% 4
Relational Databases
97 97%
3% 3
NoSQL Databases
94 94%
6% 6
Tool
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using PostgreSQL and Google Cloud Bigtable. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare PostgreSQL and Google Cloud Bigtable

PostgreSQL Reviews

Data Warehouse Tools
Peliqan acts as a bridge, allowing you to e.g. effortlessly pull your PostgreSQL data into Google Sheets for easy access and analysis using its one-click connector. Additionally, Peliqan’s platform provides a user-friendly environment for data exploration, transformation with Magical SQL, and visualization capabilities, all without needing to switch between multiple tools.
Source: peliqan.io
Top 5 BigQuery Alternatives: A Challenge of Complexity
For over three decades, the open-source object-relational database system PostgreSQL has maintained its reputation as a top SQL server due to its features, performance, and reliability. (Heck, Redshift is even based on Postgres!) It's the go-to database solution for large corporations and organizations across a variety of industries from ecommerce to gaming to...
Source: blog.panoply.io
10 Best Database Management Software Of 2022 [+ Examples]
Applications Manager offers out-of-the-box health and performance monitoring for 20 popular databases including RDBMS, NoSQL, in-memory, distributed, and big data stores. It supports both commercial databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL, IBM DB2, and MongoDB as well as open source ones like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Source: theqalead.com
ClickHouse vs TimescaleDB
Recently, TimescaleDB published a blog comparing ClickHouse & TimescaleDB using timescale/tsbs, a timeseries benchmarking framework. I have some experience with PostgreSQL and ClickHouse but never got the chance to play with TimescaleDB. Some of the claims about TimescaleDB made in their post are very bold, that made me even more curious. I thought it’d be a great...
9 Best MongoDB alternatives in 2019
PostgreSQL is a widely popular open source database management system. It provides support for both SQL for relational and JSON for non-relational queries.
Source: www.guru99.com

Google Cloud Bigtable Reviews

7 Best NoSQL APIs
When businesses need to scale, they want to do so with limited downtime. The Google Cloud Bigtable provides horizontal Scaling in a matter of seconds without any downtime. To scale, cluster nodes are quickly added to increase your overall Bigtable cluster. Google even provides the option of scaling out only for a matter of hours, to handle a large load of requests. Once the...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, PostgreSQL should be more popular than Google Cloud Bigtable. It has been mentiond 16 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

PostgreSQL mentions (16)

  • Convert insert mutation to upsert
    In this quick post, we’ll walk through implementing an Upsert operation in Hasura using PostgreSQL and GraphQL. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Perfect Elixir: Environment Setup
    I’m on MacOS and erlang.org, elixir-lang.org, and postgresql.org all suggest installation via Homebrew, which is a very popular package manager for MacOS. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Rust & MySQL: connect, execute SQL statements and stored procs using crate sqlx.
    According to the documentation, crate sqlx is implemented in Rust, and it's database agnostic: it supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and MSSQL. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Really tired. Is PostgreSQL even runnable in Windows 10? pgAdmin4 stucks at Loading whatever I try.
    Solution is just downloading and installilng pgAdmin from official pgAdmin homepage version, not the one that is included in the postgresql.org package. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Why SQL is right for Infrastructure Management
    SQL immediately stands out here because it was designed for making relational algebra, the other side of the Entity-Relationship model, accessible. There are likely more people who know SQL than any programming language (for IaC) or data format you could choose to represent your cloud infrastructure. Many non-programmers know it, as well, such as data scientists, business analysts, accountants, etc, and there is... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

Google Cloud Bigtable mentions (6)

  • Vaultree and AlloyDB: the world's first Fully Homomorphic and Searchable Cloud Encryption Solution
    In my opinion, Google has built some fantastic database services like Bigtable and Spanner, which literally changed the industry for good, and I am eager to see how they will build upon this new service. With AlloyDB's disaggregated architecture, the dystopian world where I only pay for SQL databases per query and the stored data on GCP seems closer than ever. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Google Cloud Reference
    Cloud Bigtable: Petabyte-scale, low-latency, non-relational 🔗Link 🔗Link. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • A Graph-Based Firebase
    > These triples say that the Layer with id 1 has a fontSize 20 and backgroundColor blue. Since they are different rows, there’s no conflict. This sounds a lot like Bigtable (https://cloud.google.com/bigtable), which also does last-write-wins conflict resolution layer. So this is adding a GraphQL + frontend layer to it? - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • The 4 Types of NoSQL Databases You Need to Know
    Google's BigTable paper inspired this database design, and it is capable of handling large data loads on distributed machines. In addition, column-oriented databases provide efficient compression and high performance with aggregated queries such as sum, average, and minimum. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • Can someone help me understand why data batch processing and data streaming processing pose such different challenges in data management?
    Because of these and other differences, the tools used are also different. With batch processing, data might be read from large files, processed, and stored in an OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) database (like MySQL) or OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) system (like Google BigQuery). But these would not be good solutions for streaming applications, because they are not optimized for high throughput on a lot... Source: over 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing PostgreSQL and Google Cloud Bigtable, you can also consider the following products

MySQL - The world's most popular open source database

MongoDB - MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance NoSQL database.

Microsoft SQL - Microsoft SQL is a best in class relational database management software that facilitates the database server to provide you a primary function to store and retrieve data.

Amazon Aurora - MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. Performance and availability of commercial-grade databases at 1/10th the cost.

SQLite - SQLite Home Page

Azure Cosmos DB - NoSQL JSON database for rapid, iterative app development.