Apache Spark is a multi-language engine for executing data engineering, data science, and machine learning on single-node machines or clusters.
N/A
IBM watsonx.data
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Watsonx.data is presented as an open, hybrid and governed data store that makes it possible for enterprises to scale analytics and AI with a fit-for-purpose data store, built on an open lakehouse architecture, supported by querying, governance and open data formats to access and share data.
N/A
Presto
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Presto is an open source SQL query engine designed to run queries on data stored in Hadoop or in traditional databases.
Teradata supported development of Presto followed the acquisition of Hadapt and Revelytix.
All the above systems work quite well on big data transformations whereas Spark really shines with its bigger API support and its ability to read from and write to multiple data sources. Using Spark one can easily switch between declarative versus imperative versus functional …
with iceberg open table format and Presto engine the performance and flexibility increased and also with watsonx.ai with GENAI capability which other tools lag as of now.
I think Presto is one of the best solutions out there today at the cutting edge for interactive query analysis. One of the challenges is presto is a niche tool for the interactive query use case and doesn't have the knobs and whistles as much as Spark. In the foreseeable future …
Well suited: To most of the local run of datasets and non-prod systems - scalability is not a problem at all. Including data from multiple types of data sources is an added advantage. MLlib is a decently nice built-in library that can be used for most of the ML tasks. Less appropriate: We had to work on a RecSys where the music dataset that we used was around 300+Gb in size. We faced memory-based issues. Few times we also got memory errors. Also the MLlib library does not have support for advanced analytics and deep-learning frameworks support. Understanding the internals of the working of Apache Spark for beginners is highly not possible.
Real-time transaction processing (both reads and writes) is where DataStax Enterprise shines. It's very fast with linear scalability should more resources be needed. Additional nodes are added very easily. DataStax Enterprise on its own (without Solr or Spark enabled) isn't well suited for long complicated reports. The data model doesn't support joining multiple tables together which is common in BI reporting.
Presto is for interactive simple queries, where Hive is for reliable processing. If you have a fact-dim join, presto is great..however for fact-fact joins presto is not the solution.. Presto is a great replacement for proprietary technology like Vertica
Datastax Cassandra provides high availability and good performance for a database. It is built on top of open source Apache Cassandra so you can always somewhat understand the internal functioning and why.
Datastax Cassandra is fairly simple to start using, you can install/setup your cluster and be productive in 1 day.
Datastax Cassandra provides a lot of good detailed documentation, and when starting, the detailed free videos on the Datastax site and documentation are very helpful.
Datastax Enterprise Edition of Cassandra provides more tools, good support, and quick response SLA for enterprise business support.
Linking, embedding links and adding images is easy enough.
Once you have become familiar with the interface, Presto becomes very quick & easy to use (but, you have to practice & repeat to know what you are doing - it is not as intuitive as one would hope).
Organizing & design is fairly simple with click & drag parameters.
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.
Presto was not designed for large fact fact joins. This is by design as presto does not leverage disk and used memory for processing which in turn makes it fast.. However, this is a tradeoff..in an ideal world, people would like to use one system for all their use cases, and presto should get exhaustive by solving this problem.
Resource allocation is not similar to YARN and presto has a priority queue based query resource allocation..so a query that takes long takes longer...this might be alleviated by giving some more control back to the user to define priority/override.
UDF Support is not available in presto. You will have to write your own functions..while this is good for performance, it comes at a huge overhead of building exclusively for presto and not being interoperable with other systems like Hive, SparkSQL etc.
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.
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
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.
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.
Spark in comparison to similar technologies ends up being a one stop shop. You can achieve so much with this one framework instead of having to stitch and weave multiple technologies from the Hadoop stack, all while getting incredibility performance, minimal boilerplate, and getting the ability to write your application in the language of your choosing.
Pinecone and IBM watsonx.data (Milvus in our case) both work great as a full-managed cloud-based vector database. We selected IBM watsonx.data because it integrates well with watson.ai and is a little more beginner friendly than Pinecone, but I think both are great anyway.
Presto is good for a templated design appeal. You cannot be too creative via this interface - but, the layout and options make the finalized visual product appealing to customers. The other design products I use are for different purposes and not really comparable to Presto.
