DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Kinetica vs. MySQL vs. PostGIS vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Kinetica vs. MySQL vs. PostGIS vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Widely used open source RDBMS

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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	0.66
Rank	#234	Overall
	#107	Relational DBMS

Score	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	21.72
Rank	#29	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

docs.kinetica.com

dev.mysql.com/doc

postgis.net/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Kinetica

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

2012

1995

2005

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

7.1, August 2021

8.4.0, April 2024

3.4.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL v2.0

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

C++

C, C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

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

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

yes

proprietary syntax

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

yes

based on PostgreSQL

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

based on PostgreSQL

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 or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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.

yes

GPU vRAM or System RAM

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Access rights for users and roles on table level

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

yes

based on PostgreSQL

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

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