Apache Drill vs PostGIS: What are the differences?

What is Apache Drill? Schema-Free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop and NoSQL. Apache Drill is a distributed MPP query layer that supports SQL and alternative query languages against NoSQL and Hadoop data storage systems. It was inspired in part by Google's Dremel.

What is PostGIS? Open source spatial database. PostGIS is a spatial database extender for PostgreSQL object-relational database. It adds support for geographic objects allowing location queries to be run in SQL.

Apache Drill and PostGIS can be categorized as "Database" tools.

Some of the features offered by Apache Drill are:

• Low-latency SQL queries
• Dynamic queries on self-describing data in files (such as JSON, Parquet, text) and MapR-DB/HBase tables, without requiring metadata definitions in the Hive metastore.
• ANSI SQL

On the other hand, PostGIS provides the following key features:

• Processing and analytic functions for both vector and raster data for splicing, dicing, morphing, reclassifying, and collecting/unioning with the power of SQL
• raster map algebra for fine-grained raster processing
• Spatial reprojection SQL callable functions for both vector and raster data

"NoSQL and Hadoop" is the primary reason why developers consider Apache Drill over the competitors, whereas "De facto GIS in SQL" was stated as the key factor in picking PostGIS.

PostGIS is an open source tool with 645 GitHub stars and 246 GitHub forks. Here's a link to PostGIS's open source repository on GitHub.