Fivetran vs. TensorFlow

Fivetran's business model justifies the use-case where we require data from a single source basically a lot of data but if the requirement is not on the heavier side, Fivetran comes to costly operation when compared to its peers. Otherwise, I'll recommend Fivetran for stability and update and seamless service provider.

Incentivized

TensorFlow is great for most deep learning purposes. This is especially true in two domains: 1. Computer vision: image classification, object detection and image generation via generative adversarial networks 2. Natural language processing: text classification and generation. The good community support often means that a lot of off-the-shelf models can be used to prove a concept or test an idea quickly. That, and Google's promotion of Colab means that ideas can be shared quite freely. Training, visualizing and debugging models is very easy in TensorFlow, compared to other platforms (especially the good old Caffe days). In terms of productionizing, it's a bit of a mixed bag. In our case, most of our feature building is performed via Apache Spark. This means having to convert Parquet (columnar optimized) files to a TensorFlow friendly format i.e., protobufs. The lack of good JVM bindings mean that our projects end up being a mix of Python and Scala. This makes it hard to reuse some of the tooling and support we wrote in Scala. This is where MXNet shines better (though its Scala API could do with more work).

Incentivized

• Easily connects to source data using delivered connectors
• Transforms data into standard models and schemas
• Has very good documentation to help quickly setup connectors

Incentivized

• A vast library of functions for all kinds of tasks - Text, Images, Tabular, Video etc.
• Amazing community helps developers obtain knowledge faster and get unblocked in this active development space.
• Integration of high-level libraries like Keras and Estimators make it really simple for a beginner to get started with neural network based models.

Incentivized

• Very difficult to get connectors enhanced if a specific needed object is not supported by them
• Depending on the edition needed and the data volumes, can get quite expensive

Incentivized

• RNNs are still a bit lacking, compared to Theano.
• Cannot handle sequence inputs
• Theano is perhaps a bit faster and eats up less memory than TensorFlow on a given GPU, perhaps due to element-wise ops. Tensorflow wins for multi-GPU and “compilation” time.

Very easy and intuitive to setup and maintain as there usually are not that many options. Very well documented (e.g. how to setup each connector, how the schema looks like, any specific features of this connector etc.). Also the operation is intuitive, e.g. you have status pages, log pages, configuration pages etc. for each connector.

Incentivized

Support of multiple components and ease of development.

Incentivized

It runs pretty well and gets our data from point A to point cluster quickly enough. Honestly, it's not something I think about unless it breaks and that's pretty rare.

Incentivized

Community support for TensorFlow is great. There's a huge community that truly loves the platform and there are many examples of development in TensorFlow. Often, when a new good technique is published, there will be a TensorFlow implementation not long after. This makes it quick to ally the latest techniques from academia straight to production-grade systems. Tooling around TensorFlow is also good. TensorBoard has been such a useful tool, I can't imagine how hard it would be to debug a deep neural network gone wrong without TensorBoard.

Incentivized

Use of cloud for better execution power is recommended.

Incentivized

We never seriously considered using anything else. Our data engineers had used Fivetran extensively in previous roles so when it came time to make a decision, there wasn't much of a process. They gladly signed the contract with Fivetran pretty quickly.

Incentivized

Keras is built on top of TensorFlow, but it is much simpler to use and more Python style friendly, so if you don't want to focus on too many details or control and not focus on some advanced features, Keras is one of the best options, but as far as if you want to dig into more, for sure TensorFlow is the right choice

Incentivized

• It has been very positive in serving BI team with new source requests
• It has been OK at scaling to match as data volumes as source data size grows

Incentivized

• Learning is s bit difficult takes lot of time.
• Developing or implementing the whole neural network is time consuming with this, as you have to write everything.
• Once you have learned this, it make your job very easy of getting the good result.

Incentivized