DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Couchbase vs. Snowflake vs. YugabyteDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Couchbase vs. Snowflake vs. YugabyteDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

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

High-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale applications. Wire and feature compatible with PostgreSQL.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Wide column store

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

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	2.63
Rank	#109	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

docs.couchbase.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.yugabyte.com
github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Couchbase, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Yugabyte Inc.

Initial release

2013

2011

2014

2017

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

2.19, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

YugabyteDB Managed is the fully managed database-as-a-service offering of YugabyteDB. Get started quickly, and effortlessly ensure continuous availability and limitless scale of your cloud native applications.

Implementation language

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

depending on used data model

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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-like DML and DDL statements

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

yes, PostgreSQL compatible

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
YCQL, an SQL-based flexible-schema API with its roots in Cassandra Query Language
YSQL - a fully relational SQL API that is wire compatible with the SQL language in PostgreSQL

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

user defined functions

yes

sql, plpgsql, C

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

yes

Hash and Range Sharding, row-level geo-partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Based on Raft distributed consensus protocol, minimum 3 replicas for continuous availability

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

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Strong consistency on writes and tunable consistency on reads

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Distributed ACID with Serializable & Snapshot Isolation. Inspired by Google Spanner architecture.

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

based on RocksDB

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

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

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

YugabyteDB is an open source distributed SQL database for cloud native transactional...
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Competitive advantages

PostgreSQL compatible: Get instantly productive with a PostgreSQL compatible RDBMS....
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Typical application scenarios

Systems of record and engagement for cloud native applications that require resilience,...
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Market metrics

2 Million+ lifetime clusters deployed, 6.5K+ GitHub stars, 7K YugabyteDB Community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache 2.0 license for the database
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