Carter Shanklin and Nita Dembla run a performance comparison of Hive LLAP versus Impala:
Before we get to the numbers, an overview of the test environment, query set and data is in order. The Impala and Hive numbers were produced on the same 10 node d2.8xlarge EC2 VMs. To prepare the Impala environment the nodes were re-imaged and re-installed with Cloudera’s CDH version 5.8 using Cloudera Manager. The defaults from Cloudera Manager were used to setup / configure Impala 2.6.0. It is worth pointing out that Impala’s Runtime Filtering feature was enabled for all queries in this test.
Data: While Hive works best with ORCFile, Impala works best with Parquet, so Impala testing was done with all data in Parquet format, compressed with Snappy compression. Data was partitioned the same way for both systems, along the date_sk columns. This was done to benefit from Impala’s Runtime Filtering and from Hive’s Dynamic Partition Pruning.
I’m impressed with both of these projects.