DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Snowflake vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Snowflake vs. TimescaleDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

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	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	4.87
Rank	#74	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

www.snowflake.com

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2013

2014

2017

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

2.13.0, November 2023

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

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

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

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

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

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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