Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) vs. IBM Db2 Big SQL

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

IBM Db2 is a legacy database and is primarily great for supporting certain legacy applications. It's simply not as competitive as many solutions on the market now.

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

• data storage
• data manipulation
• data definitions
• data reliability

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

• Cloud readiness.
• Ease of implementation.

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

IBM DB2 is a solid service but hasn't seen much innovation over the past decade. It gets the job done and supports our IT operations across digital so it is fair.

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

IBM did a good job of supporting us during our evaluation and proof of concept. They were able to provide all necessary guidance, answer questions, help us architect it, etc. We were pleased with the support provided by the vendor. I will caveat and say this support was all before the sale, however, we have a ton of IBM products and they provide the same high level of support for all of them. I didn't see this being any different. I give IBM support two thumbs up!

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

MS SQL Server was ruled out given we didn't feel we could collapse environments. We thought of MS-SQL as more of a one for one replacement for Sybase ASE, i.e., server for server. SAP HANA was evaluated and given a big thumbs up but was rejected because the SQL would have to be rewritten at the time (now they have an accelerator so you don't have to). Also, there was a very low adoption rate within the enterprise. IBM DB2 Big SQL was not selected even though technically it achieved high scores, because we could not find readily available talent and low adoption rate within the enterprise (basically no adoption at the time). We ended up selecting Exadata because of the high adoption rate within the enterprise even though technically HANA and Big SQL were superior in our evaluations.

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

• Performance gains were positive.
• Finding resources on the street with knowledge at the time was hard.

Incentivized