DBMS > Apache Drill vs. Google BigQuery vs. Kinetica vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. Google BigQuery vs. Kinetica 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

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

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

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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Trend Chart

Score	2.28
Rank	#119	Overall
	#23	Document stores
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	61.90
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#234	Overall
	#107	Relational DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

drill.apache.org

cloud.google.com/bigquery

www.kinetica.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

docs.kinetica.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Google

Kinetica

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2010

2012

2014

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

7.1, August 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

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, C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

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

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C++

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

GPU vRAM or System RAM

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users and roles on table level

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

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