Are there any performance benchmark(genuine ones) that compare Stinger vs Impala vs Drill? Also, which is preferred - my use case will be mainly towards ad-hoc interactive queries on top of Hive. Thanks.
There are some performance numbers on the site http://allegro.tech/fast-data-hackathon.html.
In general, we see Drill and Impala are comparable in performance for the interactive queries with the differentiation of Drill being its ability to query without metadata definitions and its ease of use working with JSON data.
Note that these tests are on much older versions on Drill such as 0.8/0.9 (also not configured appropriately for data locality). Now Drill is 1.1 with a lot of improvements on SQL (window functions etc) and performance.