Databricks Data Intelligence Platform vs. SAS Viya vs. Teradata Vantage

Medium to Large data throughput shops will benefit the most from Databricks Spark processing. Smaller use cases may find the barrier to entry a bit too high for casual use cases. Some of the overhead to kicking off a Spark compute job can actually lead to your workloads taking longer, but past a certain point the performance returns cannot be beat.

Incentivized

SAS Advance Analytics is well suited for data that is visual. Data where you want to see multiple graphs and models are good for this software. However, if your data is more descriptive this may not be the best program. SAS is well suited for data where you need to make comparisons on the feasibility of two different programs. Data that can be compared is perfect for this software.

Incentivized

Teradata Vantage is well suited for large scale ETL pipelines like the ones we developed for anti money laundering risk matrices. It handles heavy joins, aggregations, and transformations on transactional data efficiently. We generate alert variables, adjust for inflation, and monitor establishments monthly with it, all integrated with Python and Control-M for a centralised automation across the company. For less appropriate, I would say that heavy resource demands might slow down experimentation for iterative work.

• Process raw data in One Lake (S3) env to relational tables and views
• Share notebooks with our business analysts so that they can use the queries and generate value out of the data
• Try out PySpark and Spark SQL queries on raw data before using them in our Spark jobs
• Modern day ETL operations made easy using Databricks. Provide access mechanism for different set of customers

Incentivized

• SAS is can be used as query builder tool which can automate a lot of excel process.
• There are variety of statistical options available that tie up good visual analytics.
• There are inbuilt models available for different operations which doesn't require any coding and are easy to run.

Incentivized

• ETL (Extract - Transfor - Load)
• NOS to send data from Teradata Vantage to S3 and from S3 to Teradata Vantage
• Teradata GeoSpacial feature
• Bulk reading and writing in huge tables
• MPP capacity already mature
• Temporal Capacity more mature that other solutions
• TASM

Incentivized

• Sometimes, when multiple jobs depend on each other in different environments, it is not always easy to see the full workflow in one place.
• It is sometimes difficult to determine which job or cluster contributes more to the overall cost.
• For beginners, cluster configuration may be a little difficult. So more recommendation in the platform can help.

Incentivized

• SAS Analytics does not have very good graphic capabilities. Their advanced graphics packages are expensive, and still not very appealing or intuitive to customize.
• SAS Analytics is not as up-to-date when it comes to advanced analytical techniques as R or other open-source analytics packages.

Incentivized

• Teradata is an excellent option but only for a massive amount of data warehousing or analysis. If your data is not that big then it could be a misfit for your company and cost you a lot. The cost associated is quite extensive as compared to some other alternative RDBMS systems available in the market.
• Migration of data from Teradata to some other RDBMS systems is quite painful as the transition is not that smooth and you need to follow many steps and even if one of them fails. You need to start from the beginning almost.
• Last but not least the UI is pretty outdated and needs a revamp. Though it is simple, it needs to be presented in a much better way and more advanced options need to bee presented on the front page itself.

Incentivized

Not only does SAS become easier to use as the user gets more familiar with its capabilities, but the customer service is excellent. Any issues with SAS and their technical team is either contacting the user via email, chat, text, WebEx, or phone. They have power users that have years of experience with SAS there to help with any issue.

Teradata is a mature RDBMS system that expands its functionality towards the current cloud capabilities like object storage and flexible compute scale.

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

If SAS Enterprise Guide is utilized any beginning user will be able to shorten the learning curve. This is allow the user a plethora of basic capabilities until they can utilize coding to expand their needs in manipulating and presenting data. SAS is also dedicated to expanding this environment so it is ever growing.

Teradata Vantage allows us to create a scalable infrastructure to support our strategic initiatives. The dedicated compute power ensures reliable performance with isolated workloads and dedicated resources, optimizing workflows for faster, more efficient data transfers. The compute clusters support ETL processes and OSF’s developers and data science team with the flexibility to create self-service analytics, to spin up/down at any time, driving better performance and minimizing costs.

SAS probably has the most market saturation out of all of the analytics software worldwide. They are in every industry and they are knowledgable about every industry. They are always available to take questions, solve issues, and discuss a company's needs. A company that buys SAS software has a dedicated representative that is there for all of their needs.

Although nothing is perfect, SAS is almost there. The software can handle billions of rows of data without a glitch and runs at a quick pace regardless of what the user wants to perform. SAS products are made to handle data so performance is of their utmost important. The software is created to run things as efficiently as SAS software can to maximize performance.

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.

SAS is generally known for good support that's one of the main reasons to justify the cost of having SAS licenses within our organization is knowing that customer support is just a quick phone call away. I've usually had good experiences with the SAS customer support team it's one of the ways in which the company stands out in my view.

Incentivized

We have meetings at the beginning with the technical team to explain our requirements to them and they were really putting in a lot of effort to come up with a solution which will address all our needs. They implemented the software and also trained a few of our resources on the same too. We can get in touch with them now as well whenever we run into a roadblock but it's very less now.

Incentivized

SAS has regional and national conferences that are dedicated to expanding users' knowledge of the software and showing them what changes and additions they are making to the software. There are user groups in most of the major cities that also provide multi-day seminars that focus on specific topics for education. If online training isn't the best way for the user, there is ample in-person training available.

There are online videos, live classes, and resource material which makes training very easy to access. However, nothing is circumstantial so applying your training can get tricky if the user is performing complex tasks. When purchasing software, SAS will also allocate education credits so the user(s) can access classes and material online to help expand their knowledge.

Ask as many questions you can before the install to understand the process. Since a third party does the installation your company is sort of a passanger and it is easy to get lost in the process. It also helps to have all users and IT support involved in the install to help increase the knowledge as to how SAS runs and what it needs to perform correctly.

The most important differentiating factor for Databricks Lakehouse Platform from these other platforms is support for ACID transactions and the time travel feature. Also, native integration with managed MLflow is a plus. EMR, Cloudera, and Hortonworks are not as optimized when it comes to Spark Job Execution. Other platforms need to be self-managed, which is another huge hassle.

Incentivized

SAS was the incumbent tool, and what the team knew. We did look into using Revolution Analytics enterprise version of R, but the learning curve on that caused us to stick with SAS. In my current position, I've opted for WPS over SAS. I can still leverage my SAS experience, but the price is about 15% of what SAS charges, with extra functionality, such as direct database access. I can supplement WPS with free software, such R for anything that it might be missing.

Incentivized

Teradata is way ahead of its competitor because of its unique features of ensuring data privacy and data never gets corrupted even in worst case scenario. In most cases, the data corruption is a major issue if left unused and it leads to important data being wiped off which in ideal case should be stored for 3 years

Incentivized

It all depends on the type of SAS product the user has. Scaleability differs from product to product, and if the user has SAS Office Analytics the scaleability is quite robust. This software will satisfy the majority of the company's analytic needs for years to come. In addition, if SAS is not meeting the users needs the company can easily find SAS solutions that will.

• The ability to spin up a BIG Data platform with little infrastructure overhead allows us to focus on business value not admin
• DB has the ability to terminate/time out instances which helps manage cost.
• The ability to quickly access typical hard to build data scenarios easily is a strength.

Incentivized

• SAS is pretty expensive, so a company would need to take that into consideration before purchasing a license.
• A lot of companies are now starting to use SAS Advance Analytics, it is great for sharing data between departments.
• Presentations come out better when using SAS, and estimates are more precise to the confidence interval.

Incentivized

• Moving to Teradata in the Cloud-enabled a level of agility that previously didn't exist in the organization. It also enabled a level of analytic competency that was not achievable using other options on the aggressive timeline that was required. We didn't want to settle for reinventing a wheel when we had a super tuned performance capable beast readily available in Teradata. Teradata lets us focus on our business rather than spending money and effort trying to design software or database foundations features on an open source or lower performance platform.

Incentivized