DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Google BigQuery vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Google BigQuery vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	60.38
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	20.56
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

cloud.google.com/bigquery

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Google

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

2010

2016

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

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++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
PHP

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

in JavaScript

Transact SQL

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

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

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

yes

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

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