DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Apache Impala vs. CouchDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Apache Impala vs. CouchDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

impala.apache.org

couchdb.apache.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Google

Initial release

2012

2013

2005

2017

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

3.3.3, December 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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.

Secondary indexes

restricted

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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