DBMS > Apache Impala vs. ClickHouse vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NSDb vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. ClickHouse vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NSDb vs. TerarkDB

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.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
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	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#369	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#367	Overall
	#56	Key-value stores

Website

impala.apache.org

clickhouse.com

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

nsdb.io

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

clickhouse.com/docs

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

nsdb.io/Architecture

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Clickhouse Inc.

Microsoft

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2013

2016

1989

2017

2016

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

v24.4.2.141-stable, June 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

restricted open source version available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

C++

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

C++ API
Java API

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++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Java
Scala

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

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.

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Using Apache Lucene

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.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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