Apache Impala vs Apache Kylin

Apache Impala is a free, open-source native analytic database for SQL queries on open data and table formats. It targets low-latency, high-concurrency business intelligence and analytics in Hadoop environments and is described as scaling linearly, including for multitenant use. Impala works with HDFS, HBase and Amazon S3, plus Apache Kudu, Apache Iceberg and other listed sources. Supported formats include delimited text, Parquet, Avro, SequenceFile and RCFile, with Snappy, GZIP, Deflate and BZIP codecs. Clients can connect through impala-shell, Hue, JDBC or ODBC. The system reuses Hadoop file formats, metadata, security and resource-management frameworks, and shares metadata and an ODBC driver with Apache Hive. Kudu tables support queries and efficient updates or deletes; Iceberg tables can be registered with the Hive Metastore. Kerberos, Apache Ranger authorization, auditing and encrypted JDBC or ODBC connections are supported. Impala runs on Linux and macOS, supports API use and self-hosted deployment, and is licensed under Apache License 2.0.

Apache Kylin is an open-source OLAP engine for data analytics, designed for large-scale workloads with many concurrent users. Its pre-calculation approach is intended to support sub-second SQL queries. Kylin 5 can build models from SQL text, suggest index changes using query history, and use Apache Gluten as a native compute engine; the product overview describes a 2–4× improvement compared with vanilla Spark. For mixed data workloads, it supports Kafka streaming sources and fusion models for batch and streaming analysis, as well as internal tables for flexible queries and lakehouse scenarios. Teams can connect Tableau, Power BI, or Excel. A web UI supports table management, model design, job execution, and configuration. Deployment offers query, job, or all server modes. Kylin runs on Linux and uses Spark with Yarn or Standalone mode. Data storage can use HDFS or S3-compatible systems, while MySQL or PostgreSQL can hold metadata. The project is free under Apache License v2, with source and binary packages available. APIs use Basic Authentication; HTTPS is supported in Kylin 5 but disabled by default.