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by andygrove 742 days ago
Yes, Ballista failed to gain traction. I think that one of the challenges was that it only supported a small subset of Spark, and there was too much work involved to try and get to parity with Spark.

The Comet approach is much more pragmatic because we just add support for more operators and expressions over time and fall back to Spark for anything that is not supported yet.
3 comments
threeseed 742 days ago
One of the challenges is that most Spark users don't care if you 2x performance.

We are in the enterprise with large cloud budgets and can simply change instance types. If you're 20x then that is a different story but then (a) you need to have feature parity and (b) need support from cloud vendors which Spark has.

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OutOfHere 742 days ago
For the longest time, searching for Ballista linked to its old archived repo that didn't even have a link to the new repo. There was no search result for the new repo. This misled people into thinking that Ballista is a dead project but it wasn't. It wasted so much opportunity.

I don't think it's a fair criticism of Ballista to say that it failed in any way. It just looks to need substantial effort to bring it on par with Spark. The performance benefits are meaningful. Ballista can then not only take the crown from Spark, but also revalidate Rust as a language.

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andygrove 742 days ago
I wish I'd known about the search issue.

I do see a new opportunity for Ballista. By leveraging all of the Spark-compatible operators and expressions being built in Comet, it would be able to support a wider range of queries much more quickly.

Ballista already uses protobuf for sending plans to executors and Comet accepts protobuf plans (in a similar, but different format).

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OutOfHere 742 days ago
Did Databricks sponsor Comet?
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andygrove 742 days ago
No.
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spenczar5 742 days ago
There seems to be a history of data technologies requiring a serious corporate sponsor. Arrow gets so much dev and marketing effort from Voltron, Spark from Databricks, etc. Did Ballista have anything’s similar? I loved the project but it never seemed to move very fast on integrating with other tools and platforms.
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