Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) vs. Apache Sqoop

We are running it to perform preparation which takes a few hours on EC2 to be running on a spark-based EMR cluster to total the preparation inside minutes rather than a few hours. Ease of utilization and capacity to select from either Hadoop or spark. Processing time diminishes from 5-8 hours to 25-30 minutes compared with the Ec2 occurrence and more in a few cases.

Incentivized

Sqoop is great for sending data between a JDBC compliant database and a Hadoop environment. Sqoop is built for those who need a few simple CLI options to import a selection of database tables into Hadoop, do large dataset analysis that could not commonly be done with that database system due to resource constraints, then export the results back into that database (or another). Sqoop falls short when there needs to be some extra, customized processing between database extract, and Hadoop loading, in which case Apache Spark's JDBC utilities might be preferred

Incentivized

• The cluster size of MapReduce is very dynamic and therefore scalability is good for EMR.
• It also works well with other Amazon Web Services like Amazon Simple Storage Service, which means that data can be taken from those services and written back to them.
• I tried using the in-house hosting at the university I work in, but there would be a lot of complications with technical support required. For Amazon, the support and documentation was good to solve these problems faster.

Incentivized

• Provides generalized JDBC extensions to migrate data between most database systems
• Generates Java classes upon reading database records for use in other code utilizing Hadoop's client libraries
• Allows for both import and export features

Incentivized

• Sometimes bootstrapping certain tools comes with debugging costs. The tools provided by some of the enterprise editions are great compared to EMR.
• Like some of the enterprise editions EMR does not provide on premises options.
• No UI client for saving the workbooks or code snippets. Everything has to go through submitting process. Not really convenient for tracking the job as well.

Incentivized

• Sqoop2 development seems to have stalled. I have set it up outside of a Cloudera CDH installation, and I actually prefer it's "Sqoop Server" model better than just the CLI client version that is Sqoop1. This works especially well in a microservices environment, where there would be only one place to maintain the JDBC drivers to use for Sqoop.

Incentivized

Documentation is quite good and the product is regularly updated, so new features regularly come out. The setup is straightforward enough, especially once you have already established the overall platform infrastructure and the aws-cli APIs are easy enough to use. It would be nice to have some out-of-the-box integrations for checking logs and the Spark UI, rather than relying on know-how and digging through multiple levels to find the informations

Incentivized

I give the overall support for Amazon EMR this rating because while the support technicians are very knowledgeable and always able to help, it sometimes takes a very long time to get in contact with one of the support technicians. So overall the support is pretty good for Amazon EMR.

Incentivized

Snowflake is a lot easier to get started with than the other options. Snowflake's data lake building capabilities are far more powerful. Although Amazon EMR isn't our first pick, we've had an excellent experience with EC2 and S3. Because of our current API interfaces, it made more sense for us to continue with Hadoop rather than explore other options.

Incentivized

• Sqoop comes preinstalled on the major Hadoop vendor distributions as the recommended product to import data from relational databases. The ability to extend it with additional JDBC drivers makes it very flexible for the environment it is installed within.
• Spark also has a useful JDBC reader, and can manipulate data in more ways than Sqoop, and also upload to many other systems than just Hadoop.
• Kafka Connect JDBC is more for streaming database updates using tools such as Oracle GoldenGate or Debezium.
• Streamsets and Apache NiFi both provide a more "flow based programming" approach to graphically laying out connectors between various systems, including JDBC and Hadoop.

Incentivized

• It was obviously cheaper and convenient to use as most of our data processing and pipelines are on AWS. It was fast and readily available with a click and that saved a ton of time rather than having to figure out the down time of the cluster if its on premises.
• It saved time on processing chunks of big data which had to be processed in short period with minimal costs. EMR solved this as the cluster setup time and processing was simple, easy, cheap and fast.
• It had a negative impact as it was very difficult in submitting the test jobs as it lags a UI to submit spark code snippets.

Incentivized

• When combined with Cloudera's HUE, it can enable non-technical users to easily import relational data into Hadoop.
• Being able to manipulate large datasets in Hadoop, and them load them into a type of "materialized view" in an external database system has yielded great insights into the Hadoop datalake without continuously running large batch jobs.
• Sqoop isn't very user-friendly for those uncomfortable with a CLI.

Incentivized