Apache Spark vs. IBM DataStage

Apache Spark has rich APIs for regular data transformations or for ML workloads or for graph workloads, whereas other systems may not such a wide range of support. Choose it when you need to perform data transformations for big data as offline jobs, whereas use MongoDB-like distributed database systems for more realtime queries.

Incentivized

Excellent Cloud data mapping tool and easy creating multiple project data analytics in real-time and the report distribution are excellent via this IBM product. Easy tool to provide data visualization and the integration is effective and helpful to migrating huge amounts of data across other platforms and different websites insights gathering.

Incentivized

• It performs a conventional disk-based process when the data sets are too large to fit into memory, which is very useful because, regardless of the size of the data, it is always possible to store them.
• It has great speed and ability to join multiple types of databases and run different types of analysis applications. This functionality is super useful as it reduces work times
• Apache Spark uses the data storage model of Hadoop and can be integrated with other big data frameworks such as HBase, MongoDB, and Cassandra. This is very useful because it is compatible with multiple frameworks that the company has, and thus allows us to unify all the processes.

Incentivized

• Very reliable in handling data extraction, data transformation and loading
• Flexibility in connecting to different type of databases, relational or non-relational
• Great features such as parallel processing, hash handling, etc.
• You can also take advantage of its FTP functions, and scheduling features if you need to.

Incentivized

• Memory management. Very weak on that.
• PySpark not as robust as scala with spark.
• spark master HA is needed. Not as HA as it should be.
• Locality should not be a necessity, but does help improvement. But would prefer no locality

Incentivized

• You must understand and know the algorithms, since the wrong use of them generates more time in processing.
• Metadata. You need to develop with connectors, and taking all the Metadata from the menu, all the data that you complete manually, you can't track it.

Incentivized

Capacity of computing data in cluster and fast speed.

If the team looking to use Apache Spark is not used to debug and tweak settings for jobs to ensure maximum optimizations, it can be frustrating. However, the documentation and the support of the community on the internet can help resolve most issues. Moreover, it is highly configurable and it integrates with different tools (eg: it can be used by dbt core), which increase the scenarios where it can be used

Incentivized

Because it is a flexible tool that can manage many flows and create a strong solution with a interesting use of variables. Easy to scale up as you can copy jobs arleady build and modify them. SQL queries allow to be fast in development and have the pushdown feature, but you loose a little of user friendly look. Metadata management is not strong as a visual feature, but can be determine by job codes.

Incentivized

It could load thousands of records in seconds. But in the Parallel version, you need to understand how to particionate the data. If you use the algorithms erroneously, or the functionalities that it gives for the parsing of data, the performance can fall drastically, even with few records. It is necessary to have people with experience to be able to determine which algorithm to use and understand why.

Incentivized

1. It integrates very well with scala or python. 2. It's very easy to understand SQL interoperability. 3. Apache is way faster than the other competitive technologies. 4. The support from the Apache community is very huge for Spark. 5. Execution times are faster as compared to others. 6. There are a large number of forums available for Apache Spark. 7. The code availability for Apache Spark is simpler and easy to gain access to. 8. Many organizations use Apache Spark, so many solutions are available for existing applications.

IBM offers different levels of support but in my experience being and IBM shop helps to get direct support from more knowledgeable technicians from IBM. Not sure on the cost of having this kind of support, but I know there's also general support and community blogs and websites on the Internet make it easy to troubleshoot issues whenever there's need for that.

Incentivized

We used Surprise Kit for one of the other research works. It is more fine-tuned to Recommendation systems and their algorithms. Apache Spark has MLlib for majority of ML problems. Where as software like Surprse Kit - it suitable for a specific task of Recommendations only

Incentivized

No, it wasn’t my decision to use such an ETL product. I’m just the administrator at this point. I’ve heard there are other products there that are even on cloud support. That is much easier to use, more agile, and user-friendly. That doesn’t have that barrier from user to administrator to the developer standpoint.

• Faster turn around on feature development, we have seen a noticeable improvement in our agile development since using Spark.
• Easy adoption, having multiple departments use the same underlying technology even if the use cases are very different allows for more commonality amongst applications which definitely makes the operations team happy.
• Performance, we have been able to make some applications run over 20x faster since switching to Spark. This has saved us time, headaches, and operating costs.

Incentivized

• Not directly related to ROI or cost figures. Only comment here is that IBM tools tend to be more costly than average ETL tools, but it depends on if the company is an IBM shop.
• One positive aspect is the company has had not a need to switch ETL tool for years.
• Upgrading to newer versions of the tool brings flexibility in the tool and up-to-date features in relation to other applications.

Incentivized