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Amazon EMR vs Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.3
Companies using Amazon EMR often experience significant ROI, with savings up to 20% and substantial returns over on-premise systems.
Sentiment score
6.9
Most are satisfied with ROI, acknowledging its benefits, though improvements are possible, as it efficiently enhances backend operations.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and efficient, but experiences vary, especially during open-source product integration.
Sentiment score
6.8
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse support is responsive and expert, though users sometimes need online resources for faster solutions.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon EMR effectively scales to enterprise needs, with auto-scaling and adaptability, despite occasional peak demand resource allocation delays.
Sentiment score
7.2
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse excels in scalability, integration, and expandability, though improvements are needed for large data sets.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
I give the scalability an eight out of ten, indicating it scales well for our needs.
As a consultant, we hire additional programmers when we need to scale up certain major projects.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EMR is generally stable and reliable, despite occasional data-related stability issues, with robust failover and monitoring features.
Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is praised for its stability, reliability, and quick issue resolution, despite time-consuming extensive dataset processing.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is stable for us because it is built on SQL Server.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR struggles with a steep learning curve, complex configurations, unpredictable costs, and needs enhancements in stability and support.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse presents complexity, compatibility challenges, performance issues, high costs, and requires improved in-memory analysis and updates.
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integration between services like S3, Glue, Lake Formation, and DynamoDB.
It would be better to release patches less frequently, maybe once a month or once every two months.
When there are many users or many expensive queries, it can be very slow.
The ETL designing process could be optimized for better efficiency.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR's costs vary by resources used, with potential high monthly expenses, requiring careful management to prevent surprises.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse's pricing varies by needs; Azure integration can be cost-effective, but technical support costs extra.
Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 instances, instance sizes, Kubernetes, Docker services, storage, and data transfers.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is very expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR is scalable, easy to use, cost-effective, integrates well with Hadoop, and supports diverse analytics applications.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse offers performance, integration, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness for large data management and business intelligence.
Amazon EMR helps in scalability, real-time and batch processing of data, handling efficient data sources, and managing data lakes, data stores, and data marts on file systems and in S3 buckets.
The columnstore index enhances data query performance by using less space and achieving faster performance than general indexing.
There's a feature that allows users to set alerts on triggers within reports, enabling timely actions on pending applications and effectively reducing waiting time.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is used in the logistics area for optimizing SQL queries related to the loading and unloading of trucks.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd), Cloud Data Warehouse (12th)
Microsoft Parallel Data War...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (10th)
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless data integration enhances reporting efficiency and an easy setup
Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources. The service charges are based on processing only, depending on the resources used, which can help save money. It is easy to integrate with other services for storage, allowing data to be shifted to cheaper storage based on usage.
StevenLai - PeerSpot reviewer
Strong scalable solution with streamlined metadata warehousing
We use it to build our data warehouse and databases, and everything in the back end It helps streamline our metadata warehousing process. As it is our only type of data warehouse and database, it serves as our source, destination, and staging area. This product has many features which are useful…
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
28%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Insurance Company
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EMR?
Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
Compared to others, Amazon seems efficient and is considered good for Big Data workloads. Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 ( /products/amazon-ec2-reviews ) instances...
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 ( /products/amazon-s3-reviews ) buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integrati...
What do you like most about Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse?
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse provides good firewall processing in terms of response time.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse?
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is excellent but very expensive. Working on the pricing could make it a better solution.
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Microsoft PDW, SQL Server Data Warehouse, Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse, MS Parallel Data Warehouse
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
Auckland Transport, Erste Bank Group, Urban Software Institute, NJVC, Sheraton Hotels and Resorts, Tata Steel Europe
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.