Benchmarking Snowpark Vs. Spark For Data Processing

Spark has been a well-known data processing engine for years and a staple in our Keboola tech stack. Then Snowpark came along, and of course, we added it to our toolbox which is already pretty extensive – we're talking hundreds of integrations. 

But we were really curious: could Snowpark actually beat Spark, the big name that’s been around forever? We decided to check it out for ourselves and see which one is really the best in the game. Let’s get to the bottom of this.

Which one is the best: Spark or Snowpark?

While we did enter this test with a teensy bit of prejudice, the results far exceeded our expectations!

Here are some highlights: 

• Snowpark outperformed Spark in 7 of 8 use cases.
• In basic SQL operations, Snowpark's performance was 5 to 33 times faster.
• For string manipulation tasks, Snowpark was 2 to 4 times quicker than Spark.

Perhaps someone might find our findings useful so we wrote this whitepaper to document the exhaustive comparison analysis. Download our whitepaper to dive deeper into results and our methodology If you’re into data as much as we are (and we know you are), we think you’ll find the details insightful.