DBMS > Apache Drill vs. DuckDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. DuckDB vs. Snowflake

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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

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

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.95
Rank	#127	Overall
	#23	Document stores
	#60	Relational DBMS

Score	4.57
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

drill.apache.org

duckdb.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

duckdb.org/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2018

2014

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

0.10, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

MIT License

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++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

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.

yes

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

CLI Client
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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

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)

yes

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

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

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