Apache Impala vs Trino

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.

Trino is a distributed SQL query engine for analytics across large datasets held in different systems. It supports ANSI SQL and can query multiple sources together, such as joining S3 object storage data with MySQL in one query. Its parallel, distributed design is intended for efficient, low-latency analytics and data warehousing, not general-purpose relational database use or OLTP workloads. Connectors cover systems including BigQuery, Cassandra, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Redis, Snowflake, and SQL Server. Project-maintained client options include JDBC, Go, JavaScript, Python, and C#, alongside a command-line interface and Grafana data-source plugin. Trino runs in Kubernetes or Docker, or as a manually deployed server, and is optimized for cloud and on-premises environments including Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud. AI functions support OpenAI and Anthropic directly and other models through Ollama, with the language model supplied as an external service. Trino is free under the Apache License 2.0 as self-managed software. It supports multiple authentication and access-control options, but a default installation has no security features enabled.