DBMS > Apache Impala vs. EXASOL vs. Firebird vs. GridGain vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. EXASOL vs. Firebird vs. GridGain vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Score	14.03
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	2.25
Rank	#120	Overall
	#57	Relational DBMS

Score	21.06
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	1.53
Rank	#155	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#73	Relational DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

www.exasol.com/resources

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Exasol

Firebird Foundation

GridGain Systems, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2007

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

5.0.0, January 2024

GridGain 8.5.1

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

C and C++

Java, C++, .Net

Server operating systems

Linux

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

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

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

Java
Lua
Python
R

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

PSQL

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

yes (cache interceptors and events)

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Source-replica replication

yes (replicated cache)

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Hadoop integration

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

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

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Security Hooks for custom implementations

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

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