DBMS > Apache Drill vs. DuckDB vs. H2

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. DuckDB vs. H2

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.89
Rank	#122	Overall
	#22	Document stores
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	7.44
Rank	#44	Overall
	#27	Relational DBMS

Score	7.26
Rank	#45	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Website

drill.apache.org

duckdb.org

www.h2database.com

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

duckdb.org/docs

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Thomas Mueller

Initial release

2012

2018

2005

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

1.0.0, June 2024

2.2.220, July 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less

All OS with a Java VM

Data scheme

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C++

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

Durability

Support for making data persistent

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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Recent citations in the news

Apache Drill vs. Apache Spark – Which SQL query engine is better for you?
23 September 2019, Towards Data Science

Apache Drill case study: A tutorial on processing CSV files
9 June 2016, theserverside.com

MapR Advances Support for Flexible and High Performance Analytics on JSON and S3 Data with Apache Drill
30 January 2019, Business Wire

MapR Bolsters Hadoop Distro with Apache Drill for SQL-Based Big Data Analytics
22 May 2015, Visual Studio Magazine

Drill Mines Diverse Data Sets, Google Style
20 May 2015, The Next Platform

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Hands-On Exploratory Data Analysis with DuckDB
10 May 2025, Packt

Abusing DuckDB-WASM To Create Doom In SQL
23 April 2025, Hackaday

Streamlining access to tabular datasets stored in Amazon S3 Tables with DuckDB | Amazon Web Services
18 March 2025, Amazon Web Services

DuckDB project releases Local web UI, but not as open source
19 March 2025, devclass

Analyzing JSON Data with DuckDB and SQL
1 May 2025, KDnuggets

provided by Google News

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