DBMS > Apache Impala vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Lovefield vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Lovefield vs. XTDB

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.

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

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store

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	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

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

Score	0.29
Rank	#293	Overall
	#133	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

impala.apache.org

clickhouse.com

cloud.google.com/bigtable

google.github.io/lovefield

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

clickhouse.com/docs

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Clickhouse Inc.

Google

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2013

2016

2015

2014

2019

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

2.1.12, February 2017

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

MIT License

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++

JavaScript

Clojure

Server operating systems

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

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)

HTTP REST
JDBC

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

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

JavaScript

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

Triggers

Using read-only observers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

Sharding

none

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.

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

none

yes, each node contains all data

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

Immediate Consistency

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

using MemoryDB

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.

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

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