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Apache Beam VS Databricks

Compare Apache Beam VS Databricks and see what are their differences

Apache Beam logo Apache Beam

Apache Beam provides an advanced unified programming model to implement batch and streaming data processing jobs.

Databricks logo Databricks

Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering and business.‎What is Apache Spark?
  • Apache Beam Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-31
  • Databricks Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-14

Apache Beam features and specs

  • Unified Model
    Apache Beam provides a unified programming model that simplifies the development of both batch and stream processing applications. This reduces the complexity in maintaining separate codebases for different types of data processing needs.
  • Portability
    The portability of Apache Beam allows developers to write their code once and run it on different execution engines like Apache Flink, Apache Spark, and Google Cloud Dataflow, offering flexibility in choosing the right runtime environment.
  • Rich SDKs
    Apache Beam offers rich SDKs for multiple languages including Java, Python, and Go, allowing a broader range of developers to leverage its capabilities without being restricted to a single programming language.
  • Windowing and Triggering
    It provides powerful abstractions for windowing and triggering, enabling developers to handle out-of-order data and late data arrivals efficiently, which is crucial for accurate stream processing.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Beam

  • Complexity
    Although Apache Beam simplifies certain aspects of data processing, its unified model and advanced features can introduce complexity, making it potentially challenging for developers unfamiliar with distributed data processing concepts.
  • Limited Language Support
    While Apache Beam supports Java, Python, and Go, the level of feature support and maturity can vary between these SDKs, which might limit adoption for developers using other programming languages.
  • Performance Overhead
    The abstraction layer provided by Beam to ensure portability might result in a performance overhead compared to using execution engines directly, potentially affecting performance-sensitive applications.
  • Evolving Ecosystem
    As an evolving framework, Apache Beam’s APIs and ecosystem components might change over time, requiring continuous learning and adaptation from developers to keep up with the latest updates and best practices.

Databricks features and specs

  • Unified Data Analytics Platform
    Databricks integrates various data processing and analytics tools, offering a unified environment for data engineering, machine learning, and business analytics. This integration can streamline workflows and reduce the complexity of data management.
  • Scalability
    Databricks leverages Apache Spark and other scalable technologies to handle large datasets and high computational workloads efficiently. This makes it suitable for enterprises with significant data processing needs.
  • Collaborative Environment
    The platform offers collaborative notebooks that allow data scientists, engineers, and analysts to work together in real-time. This enhances productivity and fosters better communication within teams.
  • Performance Optimization
    Databricks includes various performance optimization features such as caching, indexing, and query optimization, which can significantly speed up data processing tasks.
  • Support for Various Data Formats
    The platform supports a wide range of data formats and sources, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, making it versatile and adaptable to different use cases.
  • Integration with Cloud Providers
    Databricks is designed to work seamlessly with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, allowing users to easily integrate it into their existing cloud infrastructure.

Possible disadvantages of Databricks

  • Cost
    Databricks can be expensive, especially for large-scale deployments or high-frequency usage. It may not be the most cost-effective solution for smaller organizations or projects with limited budgets.
  • Complexity
    While powerful, Databricks can be complex to set up and manage, requiring specialized knowledge in Apache Spark and cloud infrastructure. This might lead to a steeper learning curve for new users.
  • Dependency on Cloud Providers
    Being heavily integrated with cloud providers, Databricks might face issues like vendor lock-in, where switching providers becomes difficult or costly.
  • Limited Offline Capabilities
    Databricks is primarily designed for cloud environments, which means offline or on-premise capabilities are limited, posing challenges for organizations with strict data governance policies.
  • Resource Management
    Efficiently managing and allocating resources can be challenging in Databricks, especially in large multi-user environments. Mismanagement of resources could lead to increased costs and reduced performance.

Apache Beam videos

How to Write Batch or Streaming Data Pipelines with Apache Beam in 15 mins with James Malone

More videos:

  • Review - Best practices towards a production-ready pipeline with Apache Beam
  • Review - Streaming data into Apache Beam with Kafka

Databricks videos

Introduction to Databricks

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Azure Databricks Tutorial | Data transformations at scale
  • Review - Databricks - Data Movement and Query

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache Beam and Databricks)
Big Data
39 39%
61% 61
Data Dashboard
10 10%
90% 90
Database Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Data Warehousing
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Apache Beam and Databricks

Apache Beam Reviews

We have no reviews of Apache Beam yet.
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Databricks Reviews

Jupyter Notebook & 10 Alternatives: Data Notebook Review [2023]
Databricks notebooks are a popular tool for developing code and presenting findings in data science and machine learning. Databricks Notebooks support real-time multilingual coauthoring, automatic versioning, and built-in data visualizations.
Source: lakefs.io
7 best Colab alternatives in 2023
Databricks is a platform built around Apache Spark, an open-source, distributed computing system. The Databricks Community Edition offers a collaborative workspace where users can create Jupyter notebooks. Although it doesn't offer free GPU resources, it's an excellent tool for distributed data processing and big data analytics.
Source: deepnote.com
Top 5 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
Jan 11, 2023 The 5 best cloud data warehouse solutions in 2023Google BigQuerySource: https://cloud.google.com/bigqueryBest for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:SnowflakeBest for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:Amazon RedshiftSource: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/Best for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:FireboltSource: https://www.firebolt.io/Best for:Top...
Top 10 AWS ETL Tools and How to Choose the Best One | Visual Flow
Databricks is a simple, fast, and collaborative analytics platform based on Apache Spark with ETL capabilities. It accelerates innovation by bringing together data science and data science businesses. It is a fully managed open-source version of Apache Spark analytics with optimized connectors to storage platforms for the fastest data access.
Source: visual-flow.com
Top Big Data Tools For 2021
Now Azure Databricks achieves 50 times better performance thanks to a highly optimized version of Spark. Databricks also enables real-time co-authoring and automates versioning. Besides, it features runtimes optimized for machine learning that include many popular libraries, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, etc.

Social recommendations and mentions

Databricks might be a bit more popular than Apache Beam. We know about 18 links to it since March 2021 and only 14 links to Apache Beam. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Apache Beam mentions (14)

  • Ask HN: Does (or why does) anyone use MapReduce anymore?
    The "streaming systems" book answers your question and more: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/streaming-systems/9781491983867/. It gives you a history of how batch processing started with MapReduce, and how attempts at scaling by moving towards streaming systems gave us all the subsequent frameworks (Spark, Beam, etc.). As for the framework called MapReduce, it isn't used much, but its descendant... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • How do Streaming Aggregation Pipelines work?
    Apache Beam is one of many tools that you can use. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Real Time Data Infra Stack
    Apache Beam: Streaming framework which can be run on several runner such as Apache Flink and GCP Dataflow. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Google Cloud Reference
    Apache Beam: Batch/streaming data processing 🔗Link. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Composer out of resources - "INFO Task exited with return code Negsignal.SIGKILL"
    What you are looking for is Dataflow. It can be a bit tricky to wrap your head around at first, but I highly suggest leaning into this technology for most of your data engineering needs. It's based on the open source Apache Beam framework that originated at Google. We use an internal version of this system at Google for virtually all of our pipeline tasks, from a few GB, to Exabyte scale systems -- it can do it all. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

Databricks mentions (18)

  • Platform Engineering Abstraction: How to Scale IaC for Enterprise
    Vendors like Confluent, Snowflake, Databricks, and dbt are improving the developer experience with more automation and integrations, but they often operate independently. This fragmentation makes standardizing multi-directional integrations across identity and access management, data governance, security, and cost control even more challenging. Developing a standardized, secure, and scalable solution for... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • dolly-v2-12b
    Dolly-v2-12bis a 12 billion parameter causal language model created by Databricks that is derived from EleutherAI’s Pythia-12b and fine-tuned on a ~15K record instruction corpus generated by Databricks employees and released under a permissive license (CC-BY-SA). Source: about 2 years ago
  • Clickstream data analysis with Databricks and Redpanda
    Global organizations need a way to process the massive amounts of data they produce for real-time decision making. They often utilize event-streaming tools like Redpanda with stream-processing tools like Databricks for this purpose. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • DeWitt Clause, or Can You Benchmark %DATABASE% and Get Away With It
    Databricks, a data lakehouse company founded by the creators of Apache Spark, published a blog post claiming that it set a new data warehousing performance record in 100 TB TPC-DS benchmark. It was also mentioned that Databricks was 2.7x faster and 12x better in terms of price performance compared to Snowflake. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • A Quick Start to Databricks on AWS
    Go to Databricks and click the Try Databricks button. Fill in the form and Select AWS as your desired platform afterward. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache Beam and Databricks, you can also consider the following products

Google Cloud Dataflow - Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully-managed cloud service and programming model for batch and streaming big data processing.

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

Looker - Looker makes it easy for analysts to create and curate custom data experiences—so everyone in the business can explore the data that matters to them, in the context that makes it truly meaningful.

Qubole - Qubole delivers a self-service platform for big aata analytics built on Amazon, Microsoft and Google Clouds.

Jupyter - Project Jupyter exists to develop open-source software, open-standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages. Ready to get started? Try it in your browser Install the Notebook.

Snowflake - Snowflake is the only data platform built for the cloud for all your data & all your users. Learn more about our purpose-built SQL cloud data warehouse.