# Apache Drill Reviews **Vendor:** The Apache Software Foundation **Category:** [Database Management Systems (DBMS)](https://www.g2.com/categories/database-management-systems-dbms) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 14 ## About Apache Drill Apache Drill is an open-source software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications for interactive analysis of large-scale datasets. ## Apache Drill Reviews ### 1. Quick and easy SQL layer for your analytics tools **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** Documentation is very easy to get started, Can we Used with Many NoSQL, and Cloud providers with minimal configuration, Also it can be coupled with HIVE or Hadoop for better performance **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** Could have been better if there were caching layers available like trino or presto. performance on stand-alone mode could have been better **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** We Used it in one of our data aggregators, We had to combine data from different DB and formats, and transform and store the data as information. Drill successfully help to Query Kafka Table, Join Certain data Stored in Hbase with kafa. and also query CSV and pass it on to Spark. ### 2. Access multiple datasource with configuration and without burden of learning multiple DB queries **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vishal A. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 27, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** I can use SQL with RDBMS and non RDBMS databases without the need to learn no SQL queries. **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** Garbage collector needs to be improved faced issues while fetching big datasets. It can only read data in certain formats. Vice and versa file conversion support without any overhead would be great to have. **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** Validating data migration between various datasource like Oracle, mongo and elasticsearch. ### 3. Analizing log files with Apache Drill **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yehuda K. | Big Data Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 01, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** Query log files, Query JSON files, do join to other systems **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** Quick start with single instance was not that easy **Recommendations to others considering Apache Drill:** Lot of connectors, Open source, well documented **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** Joining multiple systems, working with files, querying json. Working with .gz files. easy configure ### 4. Apache Drill - An Open Source SQL Query Tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 12, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** Apache Drill's best feature is that it is open source means free of cost, easy to install tool. You can query a large amount of data from any source by just enabling the plugins. **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** The feature I dislike is that we can only query things using view, select statements. We cannot create databases, tables using Apache Drill. **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used Apache Drill for querying the Parquet files residing in Hadoop Ecosystem that is HDFS. ### 5. Apache Drill Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 22, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** Easy to use, developer friendly, Schema Free, code reusability **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** It cannot read XML, No hierarchical query support, Not much aggregate function **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** Apache Drill is helping us to get insights on customer buying pattern & behaviour which helps us positioning right products & services to our customers. Benefits - Apache Drill has significantly reduced the investment towards big data analytics. It's flexible data model has helped to query any type of data from almost any type of source. ### 6. Drill is not your grandfather's thing:) **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Investment Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 19, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** Easy way to write sql over non sql dbs. Creating view, Indexes etc **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** Faced lot of weird issue with respect to index pick up , especially while loading of data in progress . That means both write and read operations are in progress. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Drill:** I strongly recommend the use of Apache drill **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** People with Sql knowledge can now play with data in no SQL db . The easy availability of sql related functions, ### 7. Apache Drill is a good query tool. Just you can write select query. You can’t create anything **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 20, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** It is a quick query tool for any platform, be it csv , parquet files in hdfs .You just need to enavle plugins. **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** In drill we can't create any database or table. Just we can see the basic results using select statements. **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** Just querying Parquet file format files in Hdfs.It was really easy to query with the help of Drill and with easy installation. ### 8. Apache Drill-A query tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 23, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** It is easy to query a tool using apache drill, easy installation,open source tool having an interactive GUI. **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** In Apache Drill , we can't create any database ,just can use select query .And it hangs showing us petabytes or terabytes of data. **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used apache drill for our open source project in hadoop, easily configured the plugins for parquet files . ### 9. Great product **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 27, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** We can query many different data stores , which are completely different. Like RDBMS And No sql **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** Connections are little harder but not impossible **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our data is in multiple stores like oracle, mongo etc.. We want pull it one go and we did it ### 10. Easy to use without creating ddl and viewing the data **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 30, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** No ddl creation is the best option without wasting time in it **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** Nothing as of now everything is going good.. sometime it is slow **Recommendations to others considering Apache Drill:** One should definitely tey to use drill in order to save time and money **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** Creation of consumptions views ### 11. fast and easy way to use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 22, 2019 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** The use of basic SQL on serialized files such as parquet and very easy to play around in a distributed cluster.(cloud-based) **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** It works on all the files, however, for serialized it works faster on .parquet extension files. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Drill:** I think the documentation of Apache Drill is one of the best documents for those who want are SQL beginners as well as new to Apache Drill set-up. Even on standalone system you can very well set-up and use the features of database query and data manipulation. I highly recommend going through their documentation which provides an explanation of even in which scenario the drill queries will perform faster operations and why? **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** I work to extract insights for various empirical analyses from the stored files on the Hadoop cluster. ### 12. We used Drill in a proof of concept to access data in our proprietary data store **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2019 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** Drill was pretty easily extended to get data from our proprietary platform **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** The thing that we had the hardest time with was getting our organization to put more resources into turning our proof of concept into a product **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were using it to more quickly and easily pull data from our platform ### 13. Apache Drill makes querying easy **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 02, 2019 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** Apache Drill is awesome because you can use regular SQL to query multiple datastores. **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** I dislike that it can only read data in certain formats. Converting to json or parquet adds overhead if your data is not already in that format. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Drill:** Check it out, it's relatively simple to use. **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** Apache Drill has made it easy to query across all of our datastores in a universal format. ### 14. Fast queries for large flat files **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2018 **What do you like best about Apache Drill?** Better than various flat file JDBC drivers out there for querying huge CSV files. Also integrates JSON and other formats. **What do you dislike about Apache Drill?** Complicated setup, not supported on Windows (using Cygwin is a hack) **What problems is Apache Drill solving and how is that benefiting you?** Integrating with a multi-JDBC driver tool, allowing support for large files ## Apache Drill Discussions - [Is Apache drill a database?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-apache-drill-a-database) - [What is Apache Drill vs spark?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-apache-drill-vs-spark) - [How does an Apache drill work?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-does-an-apache-drill-work) - [What is Apache drill used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-apache-drill-used-for) - [What are the competitive advantages vs Presto ?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-the-competitive-advantages-vs-presto) - 1 upvote - [View Apache Drill pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-drill/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-09+15%3A06%3A42+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=7b5a2f54-3a05-4df2-9690-a41f0d8c32f7&secure%5Btoken%5D=03822301a868ac4434bb7e3891ca504bc2124c544f5869f4eacdabaffef79fe1&format=llm_user) ## Apache Drill Features **Management** - Data dictionary - Data Replication - Query Language - Data Modeling - Performance Analysis **Data Management** - Data Model - Data Types - Built - In Search - Event Triggers **Agentic AI - AWS Marketplace** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration **Maintenance** - Data Migration - Backup and Recovery - Multi-User Environment **Availability** - Auto Sharding - Auto Recovery - Data Replication **Security** - Data Encryption - User Access Control **Performance** - Query Optimization **Security** - Role-Based Authorization - Authentication - Audit Logs - Encryption **Support** - Multi-Model - Operating Systems - BI Connectors **Database Features** - Storage - Availability - Stability - Scalability - Security - Data Manipulation - Query Language ## Top Apache Drill Alternatives - [Microsoft SQL Server](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-sql-server/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (2,127 reviews) - [MongoDB](https://www.g2.com/products/mongodb/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (523 reviews) - [Snowflake](https://www.g2.com/products/snowflake/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (707 reviews)