What kind of overheads should we be aware of? Spark can run on a single machine, it could be an interesting benchmark to compare against Vertica or similar prod

What kind of overheads should we be aware of? Spark can run on a single machine, it could be an interesting benchmark to compare against Vertica or similar products. I've seen similar systems tuned for under 1s response times, even when running in distributed mode, though they were proprietary.