Apache Spark vs Impala

Overview

Apache Impala

Stacks145

Followers301

Votes18

GitHub Stars34

Forks33

Apache Spark

Stacks3.1K

Followers3.5K

Votes140

GitHub Stars42.2K

Forks28.9K

Impala vs Apache Spark: What are the differences?

Impala: Real-time Query for Hadoop. Impala is a modern, open source, MPP SQL query engine for Apache Hadoop. Impala is shipped by Cloudera, MapR, and Amazon. With Impala, you can query data, whether stored in HDFS or Apache HBase – including SELECT, JOIN, and aggregate functions – in real time; Apache Spark: Fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.

Impala and Apache Spark belong to "Big Data Tools" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Impala are:

Do BI-style Queries on Hadoop
Unify Your Infrastructure
Implement Quickly

On the other hand, Apache Spark provides the following key features:

Run programs up to 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, or 10x faster on disk
Write applications quickly in Java, Scala or Python
Combine SQL, streaming, and complex analytics

"Super fast" is the top reason why over 7 developers like Impala, while over 45 developers mention "Open-source" as the leading cause for choosing Apache Spark.

Impala and Apache Spark are both open source tools. It seems that Apache Spark with 22.3K GitHub stars and 19.3K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Impala with 2.17K GitHub stars and 825 GitHub forks.

Uber Technologies, 9GAG, and Hootsuite are some of the popular companies that use Apache Spark, whereas Impala is used by Expedia.com, 37 Signals, and Stripe. Apache Spark has a broader approval, being mentioned in 263 company stacks & 111 developers stacks; compared to Impala, which is listed in 15 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.

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Advice on Apache Impala, Apache Spark

Krishna Chaitanya

Head of Technology at Adonmo

Jun 27, 2021

Review

For such a more realtime-focused, data-centered application like an exchange, it's not the frontend or backend that matter much. In fact for that, they can do away with any of the popular frameworks like React/Vue/Angular for the frontend and Go/Python for the backend. For example uniswap's frontend (although much simpler than binance) is built in React. The main interesting part here would be how they are able to handle updating data so quickly. In my opinion, they might be heavily reliant on realtime processing systems like Kafka+Kafka Streams, Apache Flink or Apache Spark Stream or similar. For more processing heavy but not so real-time processing, they might be relying on OLAP and/or warehousing tools like Cassandra/Redshift. They could have also optimized few high frequent queries using NoSQL stores like mongodb (for persistance) and in-memory cache like Redis (for further perfomance boost to get millisecond latencies).

53.8k views53.8k

Comments

Nilesh

Technical Architect at Self Employed

Jul 8, 2020

Needs adviceon

Elasticsearch

Kafka

We have a Kafka topic having events of type A and type B. We need to perform an inner join on both type of events using some common field (primary-key). The joined events to be inserted in Elasticsearch.

In usual cases, type A and type B events (with same key) observed to be close upto 15 minutes. But in some cases they may be far from each other, lets say 6 hours. Sometimes event of either of the types never come.

In all cases, we should be able to find joined events instantly after they are joined and not-joined events within 15 minutes.

576k views576k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Apache Impala	Apache Spark
Impala is a modern, open source, MPP SQL query engine for Apache Hadoop. Impala is shipped by Cloudera, MapR, and Amazon. With Impala, you can query data, whether stored in HDFS or Apache HBase – including SELECT, JOIN, and aggregate functions – in real time.	Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.
Do BI-style Queries on Hadoop;Unify Your Infrastructure;Implement Quickly;Count on Enterprise-class Security;Retain Freedom from Lock-in;Expand the Hadoop User-verse	Run programs up to 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, or 10x faster on disk;Write applications quickly in Java, Scala or Python;Combine SQL, streaming, and complex analytics;Spark runs on Hadoop, Mesos, standalone, or in the cloud. It can access diverse data sources including HDFS, Cassandra, HBase, S3
Statistics
GitHub Stars 34	GitHub Stars 42.2K
GitHub Forks 33	GitHub Forks 28.9K
Stacks 145	Stacks 3.1K
Followers 301	Followers 3.5K
Votes 18	Votes 140
Pros & Cons
Pros 11 Super fast 1 Scalability 1 Distributed 1 Replication 1 Load Balancing	Pros 61 Open-source 48 Fast and Flexible 8 One platform for every big data problem 8 Great for distributed SQL like applications 6 Easy to install and to use Cons 4 Speed
Integrations
Hadoop Mode Redash Apache Kudu	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Apache Impala, Apache Spark?

Presto

Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data

Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

Apache Flink

Apache Flink is an open source system for fast and versatile data analytics in clusters. Flink supports batch and streaming analytics, in one system. Analytical programs can be written in concise and elegant APIs in Java and Scala.

lakeFS

It is an open-source data version control system for data lakes. It provides a “Git for data” platform enabling you to implement best practices from software engineering on your data lake, including branching and merging, CI/CD, and production-like dev/test environments.

Druid

Druid is a distributed, column-oriented, real-time analytics data store that is commonly used to power exploratory dashboards in multi-tenant environments. Druid excels as a data warehousing solution for fast aggregate queries on petabyte sized data sets. Druid supports a variety of flexible filters, exact calculations, approximate algorithms, and other useful calculations.

Apache Kylin

Apache Kylin™ is an open source Distributed Analytics Engine designed to provide SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Hadoop/Spark supporting extremely large datasets, originally contributed from eBay Inc.

Splunk

It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.

Vertica

It provides a best-in-class, unified analytics platform that will forever be independent from underlying infrastructure.

Azure Synapse

It is an analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources—at scale. It brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

Apache Kudu

A new addition to the open source Apache Hadoop ecosystem, Kudu completes Hadoop's storage layer to enable fast analytics on fast data.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Impala are:

Do BI-style Queries on Hadoop
Unify Your Infrastructure
Implement Quickly

On the other hand, Apache Spark provides the following key features:

Run programs up to 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, or 10x faster on disk
Write applications quickly in Java, Scala or Python
Combine SQL, streaming, and complex analytics

"Super fast" is the top reason why over 7 developers like Impala, while over 45 developers mention "Open-source" as the leading cause for choosing Apache Spark.

Apache Spark vs Impala