Spark is one of the most widely-used compute tools for big data analytics. It excels at real-time batch and stream processing, and powers machine learning, AI, NLP and data analysis applications. Thanks to its in-memory processing capabilities, Spark has risen in popularity. As Spark usage increases, the older Hadoop stack is on the decline with its various limitations that make it harder for data teams to realize business outcomes.

Power BI (Business Intelligence) is a business analytics platform/service provided by Microsoft. This service aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence, enabling the end-user to create individualized reports and dashboards independently. Especially for retail businesses, Power BI helps them meet the dynamic customer demands in advance with actionable insights. Microsoft Power BI service is based on cloud service, which also offers a desktop-based interface.

The importance of effective data analytics within an organization is widely accepted by business leaders at this point. With use cases for data analysis spanning every department—from IT management, financial planning, marketing analytics, and so on—the right data analytics tools can have a significant impact on a company’s profitability and growth.

From digital transformation to infrastructure optimization, business analytics and data visualization allow IT stakeholders to make sense of complex situations. You can’t improve what you can’t measure, right? More and more, we see IT organizations combining different sources of information to uncover unique insight, allowing them to detect areas of improvement, find new opportunities, optimize processes and gain that competitive edge.

VMware Tanzu Greenplum is a massively parallel processing (MPP) data platform based on the open source Greenplum Database project. It’s designed to run the full gamut of analytical workloads, from BI to AI. Because enterprise data lives and grows throughout an organization, it is suboptimal to copy large data sets between different systems as they aren’t able to perform fast enough, scale high enough, or offer the right features.

Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics solution providing interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities from data and provides an interface that is simple enough for admins to create their own reports and dashboards. Data inputs to Power BI can come from multiple sources – Excel worksheets, CSV files, database tables, log files, the web, etc. It then employs smart visualizations and built-in AI technologies on that data to turn it into interactive insights.

Hadoop ecosystem now serves as a comfortable home to Big Data now, and the Hadoop data stores now have a greater acceptance across the world by programmers, developers, data scientists, and database management experts. These ecosystems are as convenient as the data storages; however, the inherent reporting system of Hadoop poses a few challenges for the users to overcome.