Compare Amazon Redshift vs. Apache Hudi vs. Delta Lake

Amazon Redshift is the preferred choice among customers for cloud data warehousing, outpacing all competitors in popularity. It supports analytical tasks for a diverse range of organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to emerging startups, facilitating their evolution into large-scale enterprises, as evidenced by Lyft's growth. No other data warehouse simplifies the process of extracting insights from extensive datasets as effectively as Redshift. Users can perform queries on vast amounts of structured and semi-structured data across their operational databases, data lakes, and the data warehouse using standard SQL queries. Moreover, Redshift allows for the seamless saving of query results back to S3 data lakes in open formats like Apache Parquet, enabling further analysis through various analytics services, including Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon SageMaker. Recognized as the fastest cloud data warehouse globally, Redshift continues to enhance its performance year after year. For workloads that demand high performance, the new RA3 instances provide up to three times the performance compared to any other cloud data warehouse available today, ensuring businesses can operate at peak efficiency. This combination of speed and user-friendly features makes Redshift a compelling choice for organizations of all sizes.

Hudi serves as a robust platform for constructing streaming data lakes equipped with incremental data pipelines, all while utilizing a self-managing database layer that is finely tuned for lake engines and conventional batch processing. It effectively keeps a timeline of every action taken on the table at various moments, enabling immediate views of the data while also facilitating the efficient retrieval of records in the order they were received. Each Hudi instant is composed of several essential components, allowing for streamlined operations. The platform excels in performing efficient upserts by consistently linking a specific hoodie key to a corresponding file ID through an indexing system. This relationship between record key and file group or file ID remains constant once the initial version of a record is written to a file, ensuring stability in data management. Consequently, the designated file group encompasses all iterations of a collection of records, allowing for seamless data versioning and retrieval. This design enhances both the reliability and efficiency of data operations within the Hudi ecosystem.

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.