Cloudera Data Science Workbench vs. MATLAB

Organizations which already implemented on-premise Hadoop based Cloudera Data Platform (CDH) for their Big Data warehouse architecture will definitely get more value from seamless integration of Cloudera Data Science Workbench (CDSW) with their existing CDH Platform. However, for organizations with hybrid (cloud and on-premise) data platform without prior implementation of CDH, implementing CDSW can be a challenge technically and financially.

Incentivized

MATLAB really does best for solving computational problems in math and engineering. Especially when you have to use a lot of functions in your solving process, or if you have a nonlinear equation that must be iteratively solved. [MATLAB] can also perform things like integration and derivation on your equations that you put into it.

Incentivized

• One single IDE (browser based application) that makes Scala, R, Python integrated under one tool
• For larger organizations/teams, it lets you be self reliant
• As it sits on your cluster, it has very easy access of all the data on the HDFS
• Linking with Github is a very good way to keep the code versions intact

Incentivized

• It has a very user friendly library which helps users learn this software fairly quickly in a short span of time.
• The graphical user interface provided by the software is really good.
• The code that a person writes allows options for debugging.
• One can visualize the flow of control of their code inside MATLAB.

Incentivized

• Installation is difficult.
• Upgrades are difficult.
• Licensing options are not flexible.

Incentivized

• MatLab is pricier than most of its competitors and because of this reason, many organizations are moving towards cheaper alternatives - mostly Python.
• MatLab is inefficient when it comes to performing a large number of iterations. It gets laggy and often crashes. Python is better in this regard.
• There is a limited number of hardware options (mostly NI) that can be connected directly to the data acquisition toolbox.

Incentivized

MATLAB is pretty easy to use. You can extend its capabilities using the programming interface. Very flexible capabilities when it comes to graphical presentation of your data (so many different kinds of options for your plotting needs). Anytime you are working with large data sets, or with matrices, MATLAB is likely to be very helpful.

Incentivized

Cloudera Data Science Workbench has excellence online resources support such as documentation and examples. On top of that the enterprise license also comes with SLA on opening a ticket to Cloudera Services and support for complaint handling and troubleshooting by email or through a phone call. On top of that it also offers additional paid training services.

Incentivized

The built-in search engine is not as performing as I wish it would be. However, the YouTube channel has a vast library of informative video that can help understanding the software. Also, many other software have a nice bridge into MATLAB, which makes it very versatile. Overall, the support for MATLAB is good.

Incentivized

Both the tools have similar features and have made it pretty easy to install/deploy/use. Depending on your existing platform (Cloudera vs. Azure) you need to pick the Workbench. Another observation is that Cloudera has better support where you can get feedback on your questions pretty fast (unlike MS). As its a new product, I expect MS to be more efficient in handling customers questions.

Incentivized

How MATLAB compares to its competition or similar open access tools like R (programming language) or SciLab is that it's simply more powerful and capable. It embraces a wider spectrum of possibilities for far more fields than any other environment. R, for example, is intended primarily for the area of statistical computing. SciLab, on the other hand, is a similar open access tool that falls very short in its computing capabilities. It's much slower when running larger scripts and isn't documented or supported nearly as well as MATLAB.

Incentivized

• Paid off for demonstration purposes.

Incentivized

• MATLAB helps us quickly sort through large sets of data because we keep the same script each time we run an analyzation, making it very efficient to run this whole process.
• The software makes it super easy for us to create plots that we can then show to investors or clients to display our data.
• We are also looking to create an app for our product, and we will not be able to do that on MATLAB, therefore creating a limiting issue and a new learning curve for a programming language.

Incentivized