DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	76.78
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#367	Overall
	#56	Key-value stores

Website

impala.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.snowflake.com

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2013

2010

1989

2014

2016

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

V12

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

restricted open source version available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Linux
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

schema-free

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

Transact SQL

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes, with always 3 replicas available

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

none

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

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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