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Dremio 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Dremio
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (7th), Data Science Platforms (10th)
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

KamleshPant - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution offers quick data connection with an edge in computation
It's almost similar, yet it's better than Starburst in spinning up or connecting to the new source since it's on SaaS. It is a similar experience between the based application and cloud-based application. You just get the source, connect the data, get visualization, get connected, and do whatever you want. They say data reflection is one way where they do the caching and all that. Starburst also does the caching. In Starburst, you have a data product. Here, the data product comes from a reflection perspective. The y are working on a columnar memory map, columnar computation. That will have some edge in computation.
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…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Everyone uses Dremio in my company; some use it only for the analytics function."
"Overall, you can rate it as eight out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Dremio is it can sit on top of any other data storage, such as Amazon S3, Azure Data Factory, SGFS, or Hive. The memory competition is good. If you are running any kind of materialized view, you'd be running in memory."
"Dremio is very easy to use for building queries."
"It's almost similar, yet it's better than Starburst in spinning up or connecting to the new source since it's on SaaS."
"Dremio allows querying the files I have on my block storage or object storage."
"We primarily use Dremio to create a data framework and a data queue."
"Dremio enables you to manage changes more effectively than any other data warehouse platform. There are two things that come into play. One is data lineage. If you are looking at data in Dremio, you may want to know the source and what happened to it along the way or how it may have been transformed in the data pipeline to get to the point where you're consuming it."
"The solution's integration is good."
"It performs very well overall."
"We are able to monitor daily jobs, so if there is anything that needs to be done then we can do it."
"Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse integrates beautifully with other Microsoft ecosystem products."
"One of the most important features is the ease of using MS SQL."
"I'm very pro Microsoft because I think Microsoft products are highly intuitive and are widely used."
"We can store the data in a data lake for a very low cost."
"Overall, I rate Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse a nine out of ten."
 

Cons

"Dremio takes a long time to execute large queries or the executing of correlated queries or nested queries. Additionally, the solution could improve if we could read data from the streaming pipelines or if it allowed us to create the ETL pipeline directly on top of it, similar to Snowflake."
"We've faced a challenge with integrating Dremio and Databricks, specifically regarding authentication. It is not shaking hands very easily."
"They have an automated tool for building SQL queries, so you don't need to know SQL. That interface works, but it could be more efficient in terms of the SQL generated from those things. It's going through some growing pains. There is so much value in tools like these for people with no SQL experience. Over time, Dermio will make these capabilities more accessible to users who aren't database people."
"I cannot use the recursive common table expression (CTE) in Dremio because the support page says it's currently unsupported."
"Dremio doesn't support the Delta connector. Dremio writes the IT support for Delta, but the support isn't great. There is definitely room for improvement."
"It shows errors sometimes."
"There are performance issues at times due to our limited experience with Dremio, and the fact that we are running it on single nodes using a community version."
"They need to have multiple connectors. Starburst is rich in connectors, however, they are lacking Salesforce connectivity as of today."
"Sometimes, the product requires rolling back to its previous version during a software update. This particular area could be enhanced."
"It needs more compatibility with common BI tools."
"I would like the ability to do more real-time type updates instead of batch-oriented updates."
"The ETL designing process could be optimized for better efficiency."
"They need to incorporate a machine learning engine."
"In the future I would love to see a slightly better automation engine, just for the data integration layer, to make it slightly easier for end-users or junior developers to get involved in incremental updating."
"I would like to see better visualization features."
"We'd like to see it be a bit more compatible with other solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Dremio is less costly competitively to Snowflake or any other tool."
"Right now the cluster costs approximately $200,000 per month and is based on the volume of data we have."
"The tool could be expensive if we need to manage a lot of data."
"They offer an annual subscription. The pricing depends on the size of the environments."
"Technical support is an additional fee and is expensive."
"Microsoft has an agreement with the government in our country, so our customers get their licensing costs from the Ministry. Whenever we work with any government, company, or government institute, which is mainly what we are doing, that license comes directly from the Ministry of Technology and Information."
"I think the program is well-priced compared to the other offerings that are out in the market."
"All the features that we use do not require any additional subscription or yearly fees."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"The solution's pricing is fairly decent for organizations with huge data sizes."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
4%
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 Dremio?
Dremio allows querying the files I have on my block storage or object storage.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dremio?
The licensing is very expensive. We need a license to scale as we are currently using the community version.
What needs improvement with Dremio?
They need to have multiple connectors. Starburst is rich in connectors, however, they are lacking Salesforce connectivity as of today. They don't have Salesforce connectivity. However, Starburst do...
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

No data available
Microsoft PDW, SQL Server Data Warehouse, Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse, MS Parallel Data Warehouse
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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