DBMS > Apache Impala vs. QuestDB vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. QuestDB vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Columnar RDBMS optimized for Big Data analytics

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

Primary database model

column-oriented

Secondary database models

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

Score	14.03
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	2.48
Rank	#115	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	3.27
Rank	#96	Overall
	#50	Relational DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

questdb.io

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sybase-iq-big-data-management.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

questdb.io/docs

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_IQ

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

QuestDB Technology Inc

SAP, formerly Sybase

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

2014

1994

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

16.1 SPS04, April 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

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.

Implementation language

C++

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
macOS
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

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

SQL with time-series extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

C
C#
C++
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

shared disk or shared nothing architectures with SAP IQ Multiplexer

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

SAP/Sybase Replication Server

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

Hadoop integration

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 for single-table writes

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

through memory mapped files

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

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

News

Does "vpmovzxbd" Scare You? Here's Why it Doesn't Have To
12 April 2024

Create an ADS-B flight radar with QuestDB and a Raspberry Pi
8 April 2024

Build a temperature IoT sensor with Raspberry Pi Pico & QuestDB
5 April 2024

Create an IoT server with QuestDB and a Raspberry Pi
4 April 2024

TimescaleDB vs. QuestDB: Performance benchmarks and overview
27 March 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.