Apache Spark vs. IBM watsonx.data

Apache Spark has rich APIs for regular data transformations or for ML workloads or for graph workloads, whereas other systems may not such a wide range of support. Choose it when you need to perform data transformations for big data as offline jobs, whereas use MongoDB-like distributed database systems for more realtime queries.

Incentivized

Datastax Cassandra is a Java based linearly scalable NoSQL database, best-in-class tunable performance, fault tolerant, distributed, masterless, time series database and has easy-to-use administration and monitoring functionality with opscenter. Configured correctly there is no downtime and no data loss. The documentation is exhaustive, and the community is agile and supportive, and Datastax provides good support. For all these reasons, Datastax Cassandra has become a NoSQL technology of choice for many platforms. However it has some time investment on infrastructure and regular operational tasks, and if you do not have bandwidth for it, a managed NoSQL solution like DynamoDB might be more appropriate. Also if you have search needs on Cassandra and do not have corresponding Spark/Solr setup, Datastax Cassandra might not be ideal for you.

Incentivized

• It performs a conventional disk-based process when the data sets are too large to fit into memory, which is very useful because, regardless of the size of the data, it is always possible to store them.
• It has great speed and ability to join multiple types of databases and run different types of analysis applications. This functionality is super useful as it reduces work times
• Apache Spark uses the data storage model of Hadoop and can be integrated with other big data frameworks such as HBase, MongoDB, and Cassandra. This is very useful because it is compatible with multiple frameworks that the company has, and thus allows us to unify all the processes.

Incentivized

• It doesn't just store data but unlocks potential. I am able to analyse a vast amount of information, identify trends, and predict future outcomes.
• It not only gives me high quality but accessible data as well. It handles missing values, outliers and feature engineering with case.

Incentivized

• Memory management. Very weak on that.
• PySpark not as robust as scala with spark.
• spark master HA is needed. Not as HA as it should be.
• Locality should not be a necessity, but does help improvement. But would prefer no locality

Incentivized

• Integration complexity with Security Tools while watsonx.Data is well-suited for native tools, but integration with third-party security tools requires custom connectors or manual ETL pipelines. which leads to an increase in setup time.
• User interface and query time can be improved.

Incentivized

Capacity of computing data in cluster and fast speed.

As an open source technology Cassandra can be readily used with or without any commercial support. DataStax provides value-added services and features, and in the end it is up to individual situations to strike a balance between the desirability of such support/service versus the associated cost.

Incentivized

If the team looking to use Apache Spark is not used to debug and tweak settings for jobs to ensure maximum optimizations, it can be frustrating. However, the documentation and the support of the community on the internet can help resolve most issues. Moreover, it is highly configurable and it integrates with different tools (eg: it can be used by dbt core), which increase the scenarios where it can be used

Incentivized

DataStax has a good community built around it and has amazing scalability options. Though the initial setup is a bit costly, in the long run, it makes up for it. It also has powerful monitoring tools and a clean UI.

Incentivized

good recovery features

Incentivized

scalable product

Incentivized

1. It integrates very well with scala or python. 2. It's very easy to understand SQL interoperability. 3. Apache is way faster than the other competitive technologies. 4. The support from the Apache community is very huge for Spark. 5. Execution times are faster as compared to others. 6. There are a large number of forums available for Apache Spark. 7. The code availability for Apache Spark is simpler and easy to gain access to. 8. Many organizations use Apache Spark, so many solutions are available for existing applications.

We have had a few situations where we caused an outage or something has gone wrong and we are able to get a support person to offer live help within minutes. The escalation process is excellent - the best I've seen - and the support team is incredibly strong. Outside of emergencies, the team is very helpful with general questions and working through data model exercises and the subscription I believe still comes with some hours to help get the data model reviewed.

easy to follow documentation, support is there when needed

Incentivized

use saas service

Incentivized

We used Surprise Kit for one of the other research works. It is more fine-tuned to Recommendation systems and their algorithms. Apache Spark has MLlib for majority of ML problems. Where as software like Surprse Kit - it suitable for a specific task of Recommendations only

Incentivized

I believe DataStax Enterprise is the best in class. There are some things that are different with the schema-less systems but I found DataStax Enterprise easiest to implement while evaluating. The replication is on par or better than others in practice. We are evaluating Astra in our test environment and that has additional benefits we are looking forward to using.

cognos integration works great

Incentivized

• Faster turn around on feature development, we have seen a noticeable improvement in our agile development since using Spark.
• Easy adoption, having multiple departments use the same underlying technology even if the use cases are very different allows for more commonality amongst applications which definitely makes the operations team happy.
• Performance, we have been able to make some applications run over 20x faster since switching to Spark. This has saved us time, headaches, and operating costs.

Incentivized

• for one automation project, we managed to cut cloud storage costs by a third through IBM watsonx.data's lakehouse optimization
• data integration projects have had a 20 % reduction in turnaround times. Can only imagine how that will improve with the Claude partnership

Incentivized