> Drill + sergeant is (IMO) a nice alternative to Spark + sparklyr if you don't need the ML components of Spark (i.e. just need to query "big data" sources, nee

> Drill + sergeant is (IMO) a nice alternative to Spark + sparklyr if you don't need the ML components of Spark (i.e. just need to query "big data" sources, need to interface with parquet, need to combine disperate data source types — json, csv, parquet, rdbms - for aggregation, etc). I am really surprised Apache Drill is not gaining more attention / traction for reasons like the above. > I find writing SQL queries to parquet files with Drill on a local 64GB Linux workstation to be more performant than doing the data ingestion work with R (for large or disperate data sets). I also work with many tiny JSON files on a daily basis and Drill makes it much easier to do so. YMMV. Using drill both on a local machine and a 4 node cluster, I find it very convenient and fast, using an API that many people and tools are already familiar with: ANSI SQL.