DBMS > Apache Impala vs. DuckDB vs. NSDb vs. PostgreSQL vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. DuckDB vs. NSDb vs. PostgreSQL vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	4.57
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	645.54
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

duckdb.org/docs

nsdb.io/Architecture

www.postgresql.org/docs

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2013

2018

2017

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2019

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

0.10, February 2024

16.2, February 2024

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

C++

Java, Scala

Clojure

Server operating systems

Linux

server-less

Linux
macOS

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

standard with numerous extensions

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

Java
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

none

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

yes, each node contains all data

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

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

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Using Apache Lucene

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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

More information provided by the system vendor

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