DBMS > Apache Impala vs. EXASOL vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Microsoft Access vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. EXASOL vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Microsoft Access 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.

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

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.)

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

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	8.96
Rank	#48	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	105.40
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

www.exasol.com

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

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

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

www.exasol.com/resources

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Exasol

Google

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

2000

2017

1992

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

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++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

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

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

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

Java
Lua
Python
R

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Hadoop integration

Using Cloud Dataflow

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

yes

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

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

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

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