DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Quasardb vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Quasardb vs. Spark SQL

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

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

quasar.ai

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

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

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

doc.quasar.ai/master

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Elastic

Microsoft

quasardb

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2013

2010

1989

2009

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

8.6, January 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.14.1, January 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C++

Java

C++

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

integer and binary

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

with tags

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like query language

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

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

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

Java
Python
R
Scala

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

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

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

Sharding

consistent hashing

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

ES-Hadoop Connector

with Hadoop integration

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

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

by using LevelDB

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

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

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