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Databricks VS Amazon Athena

Compare Databricks VS Amazon Athena and see what are their differences

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Databricks logo Databricks

Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering and business.‎What is Apache Spark?

Amazon Athena logo Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.
  • Databricks Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-14
  • Amazon Athena Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-17

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.

Amazon Athena features and specs

  • Serverless
    Athena is serverless, which means there's no need to set up or manage any infrastructure. You can start querying data immediately without worrying about managing underlying servers.
  • Pay-as-you-go
    You only pay for the queries you run, and the cost is based on the amount of data scanned by the queries. This is cost-effective, especially for infrequent querying.
  • Scalable
    Athena scales automatically, enabling it to handle large datasets and concurrent queries efficiently, without manual intervention.
  • Integration with AWS ecosystem
    Athena integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like S3, Glue, and QuickSight, making it easy to build comprehensive data pipelines and analytics solutions.
  • Supports standard SQL
    Athena uses standard SQL for querying, which makes it easy for users familiar with SQL to get started quickly.
  • Quick to deploy
    Since there is no infrastructure to manage, you can start querying your data within minutes of setting up Athena.
  • Supports a variety of data formats
    Athena supports multiple data formats including CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet, providing flexibility in data ingestion and storage.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon Athena

  • Cost of scanning large datasets
    While the pay-as-you-go model is beneficial, querying large datasets frequently can become expensive.
  • Performance
    For very complex queries or extremely large datasets, Athena's performance might not match that of a dedicated data warehouse solution.
  • Limited built-in visualization
    Athena does not provide built-in data visualization tools, so you'll need to integrate with other services like QuickSight or third-party tools for visual analytics.
  • Learning curve for optimal usage
    Even though Athena supports SQL, optimizing performance and cost efficiency might require a good understanding of how Athena processes data.
  • Data preparation
    Data might require preprocessing or organization in a specific way for optimal performance with Athena, which could add to the setup time and complexity.
  • Cold start latency
    Athena can experience latency during query initiation, known as cold start latency, which can be an issue for time-sensitive analytics.

Databricks videos

Introduction to Databricks

More videos:

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

Amazon Athena videos

AWS Big Data: What is Amazon Athena?

More videos:

  • Review - Deep Dive on Amazon Athena - AWS Online Tech Talks
  • Review - Deep Dive on Amazon Athena - AWS Online Tech Talks

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Databricks and Amazon Athena)
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Databases
0 0%
100% 100
Database Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Database Management
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

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.

Amazon Athena Reviews

We have no reviews of Amazon Athena yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Amazon Athena might be a bit more popular than Databricks. We know about 23 links to it since March 2021 and only 18 links to Databricks. 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.

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

Amazon Athena mentions (23)

  • Vector: A lightweight tool for collecting EKS application logs with long-term storage capabilities
    In this article, we present an architecture that demonstrates how to collect application logs from Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) via Vector, store them in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for long-term retention, and finally query these logs using AWS Glue and Amazon Athena. - Source: dev.to / 6 days ago
  • Introducing Iceberg Table Engine in RisingWave: Manage Streaming Data in Iceberg with SQL
    However, Iceberg defines the storage format, leaving the complexities of data ingestion and processing, especially for real-time streams, to separate systems. While query engines like Trino or Athena excel with static datasets, they aren't designed for continuous, low-latency ingestion and transformation of streaming data into Iceberg. This often forces engineers to integrate multiple complex tools, increasing... - Source: dev.to / 26 days ago
  • Deploying a Complete Machine Learning Fraud Detection Solution Using Amazon SageMaker : AWS Project
    SageMaker Feature Store keeps track of the metadata of stored features (e.g. Feature name or version number) so that you can query the features for the right attributes in batches or in real time using Amazon Athena , an interactive query service. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Spatial Search of Amazon S3 Express One Zone Data with Amazon Athena and Visualized It in QGIS
    Prepare GIS data for use with Amazon Athena. This time, we created four types of sample data in QGIS in advance. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Enhancing AWS Athena Efficiency - Building a Python Athena Client
    If you have not heard about AWS Athena, I encourage you to take a look at this service. You can read more about it here. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Databricks and Amazon Athena, you can also consider the following products

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

phpMyAdmin - phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web.

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.

SQLyog - Webyog develops MySQL database client tools. Monyog MySQL monitor and SQLyog MySQL GUI & admin are trusted by 2.5 million users across the globe.

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.

Sequel Pro - MySQL database management for Mac OS X