DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	3.15
Rank	#95	Overall
	#14	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

cloud.google.com/bigtable

www.postgres-xl.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Google

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

2015

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

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

hosted

Linux
macOS

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

MVCC

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 rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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