Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
I am trying to build a data lake by pulling data from multiple data sources ( custom-built tools, excel files, CSV files, etc) and use the data lake to generate dashboards.
My question is which is the best tool to do the following:
- Create pipelines to ingest the data from multiple sources into the data lake
- Help me in aggregating and filtering data available in the data lake.
- Create new reports by combining different data elements from the data lake.
I need to use only open-source tools for this activity.
I appreciate your valuable inputs and suggestions. Thanks in Advance.

Hi Karunakaran. I obviously have an interest here, as I work for the company, but the problem you are describing is one that Zetaris can solve. Talend is a good ETL product, and Dremio is a good data virtualization product, but the problem you are describing best fits a tool that can combine the five styles of data integration (bulk/batch data movement, data replication/data synchronization, message-oriented movement of data, data virtualization, and stream data integration). I may be wrong, but Zetaris is, to the best of my knowledge, the only product in the world that can do this. Zetaris is not a dashboarding tool - you would need to combine us with Tableau or Qlik or PowerBI (or whatever) - but Zetaris can consolidate data from any source and any location (structured, unstructured, on-prem or in the cloud) in real time to allow clients a consolidated view of whatever they want whenever they want it. Please take a look at www.zetaris.com for more information. I don't want to do a "hard sell", here, so I'll say no more! Warmest regards, Rod Beecham.
I am so confused. I need a tool that will allow me to go to about 10 different URLs to get a list of objects. Those object lists will be hundreds or thousands in length. I then need to get detailed data lists about each object. Those detailed data lists can have hundreds of elements that could be map/reduced somehow. My batch process dies sometimes halfway through which means hours of processing gone, i.e. time wasted. I need something like a directed graph that will keep results of successful data collection and allow me either pragmatically or manually to retry the failed ones some way (0 - forever) times. I want it to then process all the ones that have succeeded or been effectively ignored and load the data store with the aggregation of some couple thousand data-points. I know hitting this many endpoints is not a good practice but I can't put collectors on all the endpoints or anything like that. It is pretty much the only way to get the data.

For a non-streaming approach:
You could consider using more checkpoints throughout your spark jobs. Furthermore, you could consider separating your workload into multiple jobs with an intermittent data store (suggesting cassandra or you may choose based on your choice and availability) to store results , perform aggregations and store results of those.
Spark Job 1 - Fetch Data From 10 URLs and store data and metadata in a data store (cassandra) Spark Job 2..n - Check data store for unprocessed items and continue the aggregation
Alternatively for a streaming approach: Treating your data as stream might be useful also. Spark Streaming allows you to utilize a checkpoint interval - https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/streaming-programming-guide.html#checkpointing
Pros of Airflow
- Features50
- Task Dependency Management14
- Beautiful UI12
- Cluster of workers12
- Extensibility10
- Open source6
- Complex workflows5
- Python5
- Custom operators3
- Apache project3
- Good api3
- Dashboard2
Pros of Talend
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Airflow
- Running it on kubernetes cluster relatively complex2
- Open source - provides minimum or no support2
- Logical separation of DAGs is not straight forward1
- Observability is not great when the DAGs exceed 2501