DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Elasticsearch vs. Firebird vs. MySQL vs. ScyllaDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Elasticsearch vs. Firebird vs. MySQL vs. ScyllaDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Widely used open source RDBMS

Cassandra and DynamoDB compatible wide column store

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Wide column store

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Key-value store

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	4.75
Rank	#68	Overall
	#5	Wide column stores

Website

impala.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.firebirdsql.org

www.mysql.com

www.scylladb.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

dev.mysql.com/doc

docs.scylladb.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Elastic

Firebird Foundation

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

ScyllaDB

Initial release

2013

2010

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1995

2015

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

8.6, January 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

8.4.0, April 2024

ScyllaDB Open Source 5.4.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

Open Source (AGPL), commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Java

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

schema-free

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

cluster global secondary indices

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like query language

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol (CQL)

compatible with CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
RESTful HTTP API (DynamoDB compatible)
Thrift

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

For CQL interface: C#, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala
For DynamoDB interface: .Net, ColdFusion, Erlang, Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

PSQL

yes

proprietary syntax

yes, Lua

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Tunable Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

in-memory tables

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

Access rights for users can be defined per object

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

ScyllaDB is engineered to deliver predictable performance at scale. It’s adopted...
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Competitive advantages

Highly-performant (efficiently utilizes full resources of a node and network; millions...
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Typical application scenarios

ScyllaDB is ideal for applications that require high throughput and low latency at...
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Key customers

Discord, Epic Games, Expedia, Zillow, Comcast, Disney+ Hotstar, Samsung, ShareChat,...
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Market metrics

ScyllaDB typically offers ~75% total cost of ownership savings, with ~5X higher throughput...
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Licensing and pricing models

ScyllaDB Open Source - free open source software (AGPL) ScyllaDB Enterprise - subscription-based...
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