DBMS > Apache Impala vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. RavenDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. RavenDB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Spatial DBMS

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

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

Score	2.84
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

ravendb.net

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

ravendb.net/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Hibernating Rhinos

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

2010

2014

2010

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

5.4, July 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

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++

Erlang

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

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

JSON types

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 properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (RQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

.Net
C#
F#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

JavaScript

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Multi-source replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

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

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a document possible

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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 can be defined per database

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Authorization levels configured per client per database

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

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