DBMS > Apache Impala vs. ClickHouse vs. GigaSpaces vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. ClickHouse vs. GigaSpaces vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

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.

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Graph DBMS
Search engine

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	1.03
Rank	#188	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

clickhouse.com

www.gigaspaces.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Clickhouse Inc.

Gigaspaces Technologies

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

2016

2000

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

15.5, September 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

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.

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Implementation language

C++

Java, C++, .Net

Server operating systems

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON 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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

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

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes, event driven architecture

JavaScript

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

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

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

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

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.

Role-based access control

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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

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