Best Big Data Platforms for lakeFS

Looker reinvents the way business intelligence (BI) works by delivering an entirely new kind of data discovery solution that modernizes BI in three important ways. A simplified web-based stack leverages our 100% in-database architecture, so customers can operate on big data and find the last mile of value in the new era of fast analytic databases. An agile development environment enables today’s data rockstars to model the data and create end-user experiences that make sense for each specific business, transforming data on the way out, rather than on the way in. At the same time, a self-service data-discovery experience works the way the web works, empowering business users to drill into and explore very large datasets without ever leaving the browser. As a result, Looker customers enjoy the power of traditional BI at the speed of the web.

Astronomer is the driving force behind Apache Airflow, the de facto standard for expressing data flows as code. Airflow is downloaded more than 4 million times each month and is used by hundreds of thousands of teams around the world. For data teams looking to increase the availability of trusted data, Astronomer provides Astro, the modern data orchestration platform, powered by Airflow. Astro enables data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts to build, run, and observe pipelines-as-code. Founded in 2018, Astronomer is a global remote-first company with hubs in Cincinnati, New York, San Francisco, and San Jose. Customers in more than 35 countries trust Astronomer as their partner for data orchestration.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform empowers every member of your organization to leverage data and artificial intelligence effectively. Constructed on a lakehouse architecture, it establishes a cohesive and transparent foundation for all aspects of data management and governance, enhanced by a Data Intelligence Engine that recognizes the distinct characteristics of your data. Companies that excel across various sectors will be those that harness the power of data and AI. Covering everything from ETL processes to data warehousing and generative AI, Databricks facilitates the streamlining and acceleration of your data and AI objectives. By merging generative AI with the integrative advantages of a lakehouse, Databricks fuels a Data Intelligence Engine that comprehends the specific semantics of your data. This functionality enables the platform to optimize performance automatically and manage infrastructure in a manner tailored to your organization's needs. Additionally, the Data Intelligence Engine is designed to grasp the unique language of your enterprise, making the search and exploration of new data as straightforward as posing a question to a colleague, thus fostering collaboration and efficiency. Ultimately, this innovative approach transforms the way organizations interact with their data, driving better decision-making and insights.

The Apache Hadoop software library serves as a framework for the distributed processing of extensive data sets across computer clusters, utilizing straightforward programming models. It is built to scale from individual servers to thousands of machines, each providing local computation and storage capabilities. Instead of depending on hardware for high availability, the library is engineered to identify and manage failures within the application layer, ensuring that a highly available service can run on a cluster of machines that may be susceptible to disruptions. Numerous companies and organizations leverage Hadoop for both research initiatives and production environments. Users are invited to join the Hadoop PoweredBy wiki page to showcase their usage. The latest version, Apache Hadoop 3.3.4, introduces several notable improvements compared to the earlier major release, hadoop-3.2, enhancing its overall performance and functionality. This continuous evolution of Hadoop reflects the growing need for efficient data processing solutions in today's data-driven landscape.

Apache Spark™ serves as a comprehensive analytics platform designed for large-scale data processing. It delivers exceptional performance for both batch and streaming data by employing an advanced Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) scheduler, a sophisticated query optimizer, and a robust execution engine. With over 80 high-level operators available, Spark simplifies the development of parallel applications. Additionally, it supports interactive use through various shells including Scala, Python, R, and SQL. Spark supports a rich ecosystem of libraries such as SQL and DataFrames, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX, and Spark Streaming, allowing for seamless integration within a single application. It is compatible with various environments, including Hadoop, Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, and standalone setups, as well as cloud deployments. Furthermore, Spark can connect to a multitude of data sources, enabling access to data stored in systems like HDFS, Alluxio, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, and Apache Hive, among many others. This versatility makes Spark an invaluable tool for organizations looking to harness the power of large-scale data analytics.

Delta Lake serves as an open-source storage layer that integrates ACID transactions into Apache Spark™ and big data operations. In typical data lakes, multiple pipelines operate simultaneously to read and write data, which often forces data engineers to engage in a complex and time-consuming effort to maintain data integrity because transactional capabilities are absent. By incorporating ACID transactions, Delta Lake enhances data lakes and ensures a high level of consistency with its serializability feature, the most robust isolation level available. For further insights, refer to Diving into Delta Lake: Unpacking the Transaction Log. In the realm of big data, even metadata can reach substantial sizes, and Delta Lake manages metadata with the same significance as the actual data, utilizing Spark's distributed processing strengths for efficient handling. Consequently, Delta Lake is capable of managing massive tables that can scale to petabytes, containing billions of partitions and files without difficulty. Additionally, Delta Lake offers data snapshots, which allow developers to retrieve and revert to previous data versions, facilitating audits, rollbacks, or the replication of experiments while ensuring data reliability and consistency across the board.