DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Apache Impala vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Apache Impala vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Spatial DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	0.51
Rank	#256	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#118	Relational DBMS

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

alasql.org

impala.apache.org

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

docs.heavy.ai

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2014

2013

2016

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

5.10, January 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

JavaScript

C++

C++ and CUDA

Server operating systems

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to SQL99, but no user access control, stored procedures and host language bindings.

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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