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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
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse offers significant ROI by efficiently managing large data volumes and integrating with existing tools.
 

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 receives mixed reviews, praised for expertise but needing faster responses and improved Azure-related assistance.
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 scales well but requires SQL expertise; performance varies compared to alternatives like Snowflake.
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.
 

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
7.9
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is praised for stability and reliability, handling large data volumes with minor concerns about processing speed.
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 needs enhancements in speed, scalability, compatibility, cost efficiency, and error messaging for better performance.
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.
When there are many users or many expensive queries, it can be very slow.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is excellent but very expensive.
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 is cost-effective for large enterprises, but costs vary by data size, performance, and support.
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 accelerated performance, seamless integration, and scalability, excelling in 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.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is used in the logistics area for optimizing SQL queries related to the loading and unloading of trucks.
The interface is very user-friendly.
 

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
37
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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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
30%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Insurance Company
10%
Retailer
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: April 2025.
849,963 professionals have used our research since 2012.