DBMS > Apache Impala vs. BaseX vs. Cassandra vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Bigtable

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. BaseX vs. Cassandra vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Bigtable

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Light-weight Native XML DBMS with support for XQuery 3.0 and interactive GUI.

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Primary database model

Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Document store

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#142	Overall
	#4	Native XML DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	3.26
Rank	#92	Overall
	#13	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Website

cloud.google.com/bigtable

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

docs.basex.org

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

clickhouse.com/docs

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

BaseX GmbH

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Clickhouse Inc.

Google

Initial release

2013

2007

2008

2016

2015

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

10.7, August 2023

4.1.3, July 2023

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

BSD license

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

Implementation language

C++

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XQuery supports types

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

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
RESTXQ
WebDAV
XML:DB
XQJ

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

Actionscript
C
C#
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
Qt
Rebol
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

Triggers

yes

via events

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

key based and custom

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

none

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

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

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

multiple readers, single writer

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

Atomic single-row operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Users with fine-grained authorization concept on 4 levels

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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