DBMS > Apache Impala vs. ClickHouse vs. Couchbase

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. ClickHouse vs. Couchbase

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Website

impala.apache.org

clickhouse.com

www.couchbase.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.couchbase.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Clickhouse Inc.

Couchbase, Inc.

Initial release

2013

2016

2011

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.

Implementation language

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Server operating systems

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

Automatic Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

Ephemeral buckets

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

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