DBMS > Apache Impala vs. FileMaker vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. FileMaker vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	47.91
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

www.claris.com/filemaker

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.snowflake.com

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2013

1983

2014

2017

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

19.4.1, November 2021

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

via plugins

SQL-like query language

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

PHP

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

JavaScript

user defined functions

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

simple rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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