DBMS > Apache Drill vs. Apache Impala vs. RethinkDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. Apache Impala vs. RethinkDB 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

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

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

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Spatial DBMS

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

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

Score	14.03
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#106	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

rethinkdb.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2013

2009

2014

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

4.1.0, June 2022

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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

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

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

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

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C++

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

Triggers

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

range based

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic single-document operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

yes

users and table-level permissions

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

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