DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. RRDtool vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. RRDtool vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	10.63
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	93.76
Rank	#12	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	24.97
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	1.70
Rank	#136	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Microsoft

Tobias Oetiker

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

1992

2014

1999

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

1.8.0, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

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++

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

Server operating systems

Linux

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

HP-UX
Linux

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

Numeric data only

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.

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

in-process shared library
Pipes

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

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

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

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

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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

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