DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Geode vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake vs. Splice Machine

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Geode vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake vs. Splice Machine

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Geode is a distributed data container, pooling memory, CPU, network resources, and optionally local disk across multiple processes

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

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

Open-Source SQL RDBMS for Operational and Analytical use cases with native Machine Learning, powered by Hadoop and Spark

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	1.92
Rank	#131	Overall
	#23	Key-value stores

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.54
Rank	#250	Overall
	#114	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

geode.apache.org/docs

questdb.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

splicemachine.com/how-it-works

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Originally developed by Gemstone. They outsourced the project to Apache in 2015 but still deliver a commercial version as Gemfire.

QuestDB Technology Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Splice Machine

Initial release

2013

2002

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

1.1, February 2017

3.1, March 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available as Gemfire

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

AGPL 3.0, commercial license available

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.

Implementation language

C++

Java

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Java

Server operating systems

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

the JDK (8 or later) is also required

Linux
macOS
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

yes

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

yes

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-like query language (OQL)

SQL with time-series extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Java Client API
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
Native Spark Datasource
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
All JVM based languages
C++
Groovy
Java
Scala

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

yes

Java

Triggers

yes

Cache Event Listeners

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

yes

Shared Nothhing Auto-Sharding, Columnar Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

Yes, via Full Spark Integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes, on a single node

ACID for single-table writes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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.

yes

through memory mapped files

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Access rights per client and object definable

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
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Competitive advantages

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
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Typical application scenarios

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

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