Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) vs. Amazon Redshift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon EMR
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Amazon EMR is a cloud-native big data platform for processing vast amounts of data quickly, at scale. Using open source tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, Apache Flink, Apache Hudi (Incubating), and Presto, coupled with the scalability of Amazon EC2 and scalable storage of Amazon S3, EMR gives analytical teams the engines and elasticity to run Petabyte-scale analysis.N/A
Amazon Redshift
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
$0.24
per GB per month
Pricing
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Amazon Redshift
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Redshift Managed Storage
$0.24
per GB per month
Current Generation
$0.25 - $13.04
per hour
Previous Generation
$0.25 - $4.08
per hour
Redshift Spectrum
$5.00
per terabyte of data scanned
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon EMRAmazon Redshift
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Amazon Redshift
Considered Both Products
Amazon EMR
Chose Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)
Snowflake is a lot easier to get started with than the other options. Snowflake's data lake building capabilities are far more powerful. Although Amazon EMR isn't our first pick, we've had an excellent experience with EC2 and S3. Because of our current API interfaces, it made …
Chose Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)
Having one of these enterprise edition license comes at its own costs. But, the flexibility to have the cluster spin up with the workbenches and code snippets on the same is really beneficial. Especially, if one had to move out of EMR and consider an option which reduces the …
Amazon Redshift
Chose Amazon Redshift
We evaluated [Amazon] Redshift vs BigQuery vs Amazon EMR, back in 2014.
Back then BigQuery cost was slightly higher than that of [Amazon] Redshift price structure.
Amazon EMR, needs lots more management (Admin tasks) and EMR is designed to be ephemeral and not designed to be a …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Amazon Redshift
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudera Manager
Cloudera Manager
Score 9.7 out of 10
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 8.8 out of 10
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Amazon Redshift
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(19 ratings)
8.0
(37 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(3 ratings)
10.0
(9 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(3 ratings)
9.0
(7 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Amazon Redshift
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
We are running it to perform preparation which takes a few hours on EC2 to be running on a spark-based EMR cluster to total the preparation inside minutes rather than a few hours. Ease of utilization and capacity to select from either Hadoop or spark. Processing time diminishes from 5-8 hours to 25-30 minutes compared with the Ec2 occurrence and more in a few cases.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Amazon Elastic MapReduce works well for managing analyses that use multiple tools, such as Hadoop and Spark. If it were not for the fact that we use multiple tools, there would be less need for MapReduce.
  • MapReduce is always on. I've never had a problem getting data analyses to run on the system. It's simple to set up data mining projects.
  • Amazon Elastic MapReduce has no problems dealing with very large data sets. It processes them just fine. With that said, the outputs don't come instantaneously. It takes time.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • [Amazon] Redshift has Distribution Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables, it improves Query performance. For instance, we can define Mapping/Meta-data tables with Distribution-All Key, so that it gets replicated across all the nodes, for fast joins and fast query results.
  • [Amazon] Redshift has Sort Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables along with above Distribution Keys, it further improves your Query performance. It also has Composite Sort Keys and Interleaved Sort Keys, to support various use cases
  • [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to make it a powerful data store.
  • [Amazon] Redshift has "Analyze" operation that could be performed on tables, which will update the stats of the table in leader node. This is sort of a ledger about which data is stored in which node and which partition with in a node. Up to date stats improves Query performance.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Sometimes bootstrapping certain tools comes with debugging costs. The tools provided by some of the enterprise editions are great compared to EMR.
  • Like some of the enterprise editions EMR does not provide on premises options.
  • No UI client for saving the workbooks or code snippets. Everything has to go through submitting process. Not really convenient for tracking the job as well.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • We've experienced some problems with hanging queries on Redshift Spectrum/external tables. We've had to roll back to and old version of Redshift while we wait for AWS to provide a patch.
  • Redshift's dialect is most similar to that of PostgreSQL 8. It lacks many modern features and data types.
  • Constraints are not enforced. We must rely on other means to verify the integrity of transformed tables.
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
I give Amazon EMR this rating because while it is great at simplifying running big data frameworks, providing the Amazon EMR highlights, product details, and pricing information, and analyzing vast amounts of data, it can be run slow, freeze and glitch sometimes. So overall Amazon EMR is pretty good to use other than some basic issues.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
Just very happy with the product, it fits our needs perfectly. Amazon pioneered the cloud and we have had a positive experience using RedShift. Really cool to be able to see your data housed and to be able to query and perform administrative tasks with ease.
Read full review
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
There's a vast group of trained and certified (by AWS) professionals ready to work for anyone that needs to implement, configure or fix EMR. There's also a great amount of documentation that is accessible to anyone who's trying to learn this. And there's also always the help of AWS itself. They have people ready to help you analyze your needs and then make a recommendation.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Snowflake is a lot easier to get started with than the other options. Snowflake's data lake building capabilities are far more powerful. Although Amazon EMR isn't our first pick, we've had an excellent experience with EC2 and S3. Because of our current API interfaces, it made more sense for us to continue with Hadoop rather than explore other options.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
Than Vertica: Redshift is cheaper and AWS integrated (which was a plus because the whole company was on AWS).
Than BigQuery: Redshift has a standard SQL interface, though recently I heard good things about BigQuery and would try it out again.
Than Hive: Hive is great if you are in the PB+ range, but latencies tend to be much slower than Redshift and it is not suited for ad-hoc applications.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
Redshift is relatively cheaper tool but since the pricing is dynamic, there is always a risk of exceeding the cost. Since most of our team is using it as self serve and there is no continuous tracking by a dedicated team, it really needs time & effort on analyst's side to know how much it is going to cost.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Positive: Helped process the jobs amazingly fast.
  • Positive: Did not have to spend much time to learn the system, therefore, saving valuable research time.
  • Negative: Not flexible for some scenarios, like when some plugins are required, or when the project has to be moved in-house.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • Our company is moving to the AWS infrastructure, and in this context moving the warehouse environments to Redshift sounds logical regardless of the cost.
  • Development organizations have to operate in the Dev/Ops mode where they build and support their apps at the same time.
  • Hard to estimate the overall ROI of moving to Redshift from my position. However, running Redshift seems to be inexpensive compared to all the licensing and hardware costs we had on our RDBMS platform before Redshift.
Read full review
ScreenShots