Amazon Athena vs. Apache Spark

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Athena
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Athena at their data stored in S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to setup or manage, and customers pay only for the queries they run. You can use Athena to process logs, perform ad-hoc analysis, and run…
$5
per TB of Data Scanned
Apache Spark
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
Pricing
Amazon AthenaApache Spark
Editions & Modules
Price per Query
$5.00
per TB of Data Scanned
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon AthenaApache Spark
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon AthenaApache Spark
Considered Both Products
Amazon Athena

No answer on this topic

Apache Spark
Chose Apache Spark
Spark is simply awesome to work on with any data sets and also has an in-memory database which makes it very flexible.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon AthenaApache Spark
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Athena
8.5
3 Ratings
3% below category average
Apache Spark
-
Ratings
Automatic software patching8.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Database scalability8.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated backups7.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Database security provisions9.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics8.83 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment9.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon AthenaApache Spark
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.2 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.2 out of 10
Cloudera Manager
Cloudera Manager
Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.2 out of 10
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon AthenaApache Spark
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(3 ratings)
9.9
(23 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon AthenaApache Spark
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
If you are looking to take a lot of the traditional "database administration" work off someone's plate, going with Amazon Athena certainly has "no code" options to optimize lots of database tasks. I would say this option is less appropriate if you have other Microsoft things at play, such as Power BI.
Read full review
Apache
Well suited: To most of the local run of datasets and non-prod systems - scalability is not a problem at all. Including data from multiple types of data sources is an added advantage. MLlib is a decently nice built-in library that can be used for most of the ML tasks. Less appropriate: We had to work on a RecSys where the music dataset that we used was around 300+Gb in size. We faced memory-based issues. Few times we also got memory errors. Also the MLlib library does not have support for advanced analytics and deep-learning frameworks support. Understanding the internals of the working of Apache Spark for beginners is highly not possible.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Nested Schemas like JSON data structure
  • Ability to adapt the data model to fit your queries better
  • Performance Improvement
Read full review
Apache
  • Rich APIs for data transformation making for very each to transform and prepare data in a distributed environment without worrying about memory issues
  • Faster in execution times compare to Hadoop and PIG Latin
  • Easy SQL interface to the same data set for people who are comfortable to explore data in a declarative manner
  • Interoperability between SQL and Scala / Python style of munging data
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Query manager can incoperate GUI based query designer
  • Auto-completion engine sometimes overwrite the query
  • Time range selection should be implicit
Read full review
Apache
  • 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
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Apache
Capacity of computing data in cluster and fast speed.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Apache
The only thing I dislike about spark's usability is the learning curve, there are many actions and transformations, however, its wide-range of uses for ETL processing, facility to integrate and it's multi-language support make this library a powerhouse for your data science solutions. It has especially aided us with its lightning-fast processing times.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Apache
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Amazon Athena, a product from Amazon, competes with offerings from Google and Microsoft. Overall, I think your database choice depends on some of the other applications you are running at your company. For example, if you are using Microsoft Power BI for reporting needs, you might want to consider going the Azure route.
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Apache
Spark in comparison to similar technologies ends up being a one stop shop. You can achieve so much with this one framework instead of having to stitch and weave multiple technologies from the Hadoop stack, all while getting incredibility performance, minimal boilerplate, and getting the ability to write your application in the language of your choosing.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Easy to query terabytes of data with faster response
  • Pricing model is also cheap
  • No indexing and partitioning
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Apache
  • Business leaders are able to take data driven decisions
  • Business users are able access to data in near real time now . Before using spark, they had to wait for at least 24 hours for data to be available
  • Business is able come up with new product ideas
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ScreenShots