Actian AI Analytics Platform vs. Databricks Data Intelligence Platform

VectorWise is suitable to be a departmental data mart database or an operational data store (ODS). It is not suitable for enterprise data warehouse database.

Incentivized

If you need a managed big data megastore, which has native integration with highly optimized Apache Spark Engine and native integration with MLflow, go for Databricks Lakehouse Platform. The Databricks Lakehouse Platform is a breeze to use and analytics capabilities are supported out of the box. You will find it a bit difficult to manage code in notebooks but you will get used to it soon.

Incentivized

• The support community was not as robust as you would find in a Mulesoft or Informatica environment. Given time and growth, it’s possible it will blossom, but for now it is minimal.
• Training is always a big thing for us, and the tool was not expansive enough for us to implement our own internal training program. There was some online training, and we acquired an expert when we brought on the new company, but some additional training tools would have helped the tool grown its user base internally.
• Not a lot to set it apart from the competition. Most of the features are available with other more established tools, but for a small company that maybe grew too quickly and needs to get its arms around many different data sources, I can see the appeal. Not really geared for larger firms.

Incentivized

• First, it handles large amounts of data. We run daily and weekly jobs that process a lot of records. Databricks manages it very well, with no issues, if the cluster is set up properly.
• Second, it really works well for incremental updates. We load only new or changed data, which makes it easy to update existing tables without duplicating records.
• Third, job scheduling is useful. We can schedule the jobs easily and monitor them. The best part is that we can retry or repair the failed runs.
• The last one is about the notebook interface that I really love. It makes development and debugging easy. We can test logic step by step, validate data, and fix all our issues.

Incentivized

• As I said before, more training or greater visibility to training tools/options would be a plus. It’s easy to publish YouTube videos these days, I think they should make more of them.
• Differentiation would help, there’s not a lot out there to drive you to buy the product if you are well informed in the market. If you know the market, you steer towards the large or trendy products. It’s a good product, but lost in the noise of the field I think.
• Hitching the wagon to a major software brand (like Mule did to Salesforce) would help grow the user base, and thus increase the activity in the support community. More users also translates into product champions.

Incentivized

• Connect my local code in Visual code to my Databricks Lakehouse Platform cluster so I can run the code on the cluster. The old databricks-connect approach has many bugs and is hard to set up. The new Databricks Lakehouse Platform extension on Visual Code, doesn't allow the developers to debug their code line by line (only we can run the code).
• Maybe have a specific Databricks Lakehouse Platform IDE that can be used by Databricks Lakehouse Platform users to develop locally.
• Visualization in MLFLOW experiment can be enhanced

Incentivized

Because it is an amazing platform for designing experiments and delivering a deep dive analysis that requires execution of highly complex queries, as well as it allows to share the information and insights across the company with their shared workspaces, while keeping it secured.

in terms of graph generation and interaction it could improve their UI and UX

Incentivized

One of the best customer and technology support that I have ever experienced in my career. You pay for what you get and you get the Rolls Royce. It reminds me of the customer support of SAS in the 2000s when the tools were reaching some limits and their engineer wanted to know more about what we were doing, long before "data science" was even a name. Databricks truly embraces the partnership with their customer and help them on any given challenge.

We didn’t actually choose Actian, it arrived as part of an acquisition, and really served its purpose both when it was used by the smaller firm we acquired as well as afterwards when we were extracting data and folding the company into our own data and analytics culture. The included hundreds of pre-built connectors gave us lots of options, but in the end, we were just too large of a company to rely on the product and needed a big-name player to address our wide-ranging needs. Powerful for its size, but not sized enough to address big businesses.

Incentivized

Databricks is a true all-in-one platform, and at the time of implementation, it had more features available to us, making it a clear choice over Snowflake. Moving our workloads from local computing to the servers in Databricks gave our start-up staff a great quality of life boost.

Incentivized

• We had to move out of VectorWise after using the database for 2 years. Hence no positive impacts.

Incentivized

• ROI for us has been tremendous. Time to market by processing raw data in our big data infrastructure has been pretty fast.
• Non engineers can easily use Databricks, hence helping business customers.
• Thousands of different data combinations can easily be joined and used by our data teams.

Incentivized