DBMS > Apache Impala vs. EXASOL vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. EXASOL vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB

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

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

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	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	4.94
Rank	#72	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

www.exasol.com/resources

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Exasol

Snowflake Computing Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2013

2000

2014

2016

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

7.6.0, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

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

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

Java
Lua
Python
R

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Hadoop integration

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

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

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

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

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
» more

Typical application scenarios

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
» more

Key customers

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
» more

Market metrics

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

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