Amazon EMR vs Amazon Redshift vs Google BigQuery

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Amazon EMR

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680
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Amazon Redshift

1.5K
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Google BigQuery

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Amazon EMR vs Amazon Redshift vs Google BigQuery: What are the differences?

# Introduction
This Markdown provides a comparison between Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery in terms of key differences.

1. **Deployment Type**: Amazon EMR is a fully managed Hadoop framework to process large amounts of data, whereas Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehousing solution that is optimized for high-performance analysis at scale. Google BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multi-cloud data warehouse for analytics.
2. **Data Processing Approach**: Amazon EMR processes data using Apache Hadoop and Spark, which allows for complex data transformations and analysis. Amazon Redshift integrates with existing Business Intelligence tools and SQL-based analytics. Google BigQuery supports a SQL-like query language and provides real-time analytics.
3. **Scalability**: Amazon EMR can scale both horizontally and vertically based on demand by adding or removing nodes. Amazon Redshift offers automatic scaling capabilities to handle growing workloads efficiently. Google BigQuery is designed to automatically scale to match the query workload in real-time.
4. **Pricing Structure**: Amazon EMR pricing is based on the type and number of EC2 instances used, along with additional charges for storage. Amazon Redshift pricing is based on the type and number of nodes in the cluster, as well as the amount of data stored. Google BigQuery pricing is based on the amount of data processed for queries and storage costs.
5. **Integration with Other Services**: Amazon EMR integrates seamlessly with other AWS services such as S3, DynamoDB, and Kinesis for data ingestion and storage. Amazon Redshift integrates with various AWS services for data loading and extraction. Google BigQuery integrates with Google Cloud services like Cloud Storage, Dataflow, and Dataprep for data analytics workflows.

In Summary, this Markdown highlights the key differences in deployment type, data processing approach, scalability, pricing structure, and integration capabilities between Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery.
Advice on Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery

We need to perform ETL from several databases into a data warehouse or data lake. We want to

  • keep raw and transformed data available to users to draft their own queries efficiently
  • give users the ability to give custom permissions and SSO
  • move between open-source on-premises development and cloud-based production environments

We want to use inexpensive Amazon EC2 instances only on medium-sized data set 16GB to 32GB feeding into Tableau Server or PowerBI for reporting and data analysis purposes.

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Replies (3)
John Nguyen
Recommends
on
AirflowAirflowAWS LambdaAWS Lambda

You could also use AWS Lambda and use Cloudwatch event schedule if you know when the function should be triggered. The benefit is that you could use any language and use the respective database client.

But if you orchestrate ETLs then it makes sense to use Apache Airflow. This requires Python knowledge.

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Recommends
on
AirflowAirflow

Though we have always built something custom, Apache airflow (https://airflow.apache.org/) stood out as a key contender/alternative when it comes to open sources. On the commercial offering, Amazon Redshift combined with Amazon Kinesis (for complex manipulations) is great for BI, though Redshift as such is expensive.

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Recommends

You may want to look into a Data Virtualization product called Conduit. It connects to disparate data sources in AWS, on prem, Azure, GCP, and exposes them as a single unified Spark SQL view to PowerBI (direct query) or Tableau. Allows auto query and caching policies to enhance query speeds and experience. Has a GPU query engine and optimized Spark for fallback. Can be deployed on your AWS VM or on prem, scales up and out. Sounds like the ideal solution to your needs.

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Decisions about Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery
Julien Lafont

Cloud Data-warehouse is the centerpiece of modern Data platform. The choice of the most suitable solution is therefore fundamental.

Our benchmark was conducted over BigQuery and Snowflake. These solutions seem to match our goals but they have very different approaches.

BigQuery is notably the only 100% serverless cloud data-warehouse, which requires absolutely NO maintenance: no re-clustering, no compression, no index optimization, no storage management, no performance management. Snowflake requires to set up (paid) reclustering processes, to manage the performance allocated to each profile, etc. We can also mention Redshift, which we have eliminated because this technology requires even more ops operation.

BigQuery can therefore be set up with almost zero cost of human resources. Its on-demand pricing is particularly adapted to small workloads. 0 cost when the solution is not used, only pay for the query you're running. But quickly the use of slots (with monthly or per-minute commitment) will drastically reduce the cost of use. We've reduced by 10 the cost of our nightly batches by using flex slots.

Finally, a major advantage of BigQuery is its almost perfect integration with Google Cloud Platform services: Cloud functions, Dataflow, Data Studio, etc.

BigQuery is still evolving very quickly. The next milestone, BigQuery Omni, will allow to run queries over data stored in an external Cloud platform (Amazon S3 for example). It will be a major breakthrough in the history of cloud data-warehouses. Omni will compensate a weakness of BigQuery: transferring data in near real time from S3 to BQ is not easy today. It was even simpler to implement via Snowflake's Snowpipe solution.

We also plan to use the Machine Learning features built into BigQuery to accelerate our deployment of Data-Science-based projects. An opportunity only offered by the BigQuery solution

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Pros of Amazon EMR
Pros of Amazon Redshift
Pros of Google BigQuery
  • 15
    On demand processing power
  • 12
    Don't need to maintain Hadoop Cluster yourself
  • 7
    Hadoop Tools
  • 6
    Elastic
  • 4
    Backed by Amazon
  • 3
    Flexible
  • 3
    Economic - pay as you go, easy to use CLI and SDKs
  • 2
    Don't need a dedicated Ops group
  • 1
    Massive data handling
  • 1
    Great support
  • 41
    Data Warehousing
  • 27
    Scalable
  • 17
    SQL
  • 14
    Backed by Amazon
  • 5
    Encryption
  • 1
    Cheap and reliable
  • 1
    Isolation
  • 1
    Best Cloud DW Performance
  • 1
    Fast columnar storage
  • 28
    High Performance
  • 25
    Easy to use
  • 22
    Fully managed service
  • 19
    Cheap Pricing
  • 16
    Process hundreds of GB in seconds
  • 12
    Big Data
  • 11
    Full table scans in seconds, no indexes needed
  • 8
    Always on, no per-hour costs
  • 6
    Good combination with fluentd
  • 4
    Machine learning
  • 1
    Easy to manage
  • 0
    Easy to learn

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Cons of Amazon EMR
Cons of Amazon Redshift
Cons of Google BigQuery
    Be the first to leave a con
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 1
        You can't unit test changes in BQ data

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      What is Amazon EMR?

      It is used in a variety of applications, including log analysis, data warehousing, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics.

      What is Amazon Redshift?

      It is optimized for data sets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.

      What is Google BigQuery?

      Run super-fast, SQL-like queries against terabytes of data in seconds, using the processing power of Google's infrastructure. Load data with ease. Bulk load your data using Google Cloud Storage or stream it in. Easy access. Access BigQuery by using a browser tool, a command-line tool, or by making calls to the BigQuery REST API with client libraries such as Java, PHP or Python.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

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      What tools integrate with Amazon EMR?
      What tools integrate with Amazon Redshift?
      What tools integrate with Google BigQuery?

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      What are some alternatives to Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery?
      Amazon EC2
      It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
      Hadoop
      The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.
      Amazon DynamoDB
      With it , you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.
      Azure HDInsight
      It is a cloud-based service from Microsoft for big data analytics that helps organizations process large amounts of streaming or historical data.
      Databricks
      Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, from the original creators of Apache Spark™, unifies data science and engineering across the Machine Learning lifecycle from data preparation to experimentation and deployment of ML applications.
      See all alternatives