Open-source Microsoft Fabric alternatives

Apache Spark is an analytics engine that brings batch, SQL, machine learning, graph and streaming workloads together for processing data at scale. It is maintained by the Apache Software Foundation under the Apache-2.0 license. It is written mainly in Scala and offers high-level APIs in Scala, Java and Python, with an R API that is now deprecated, on top of an engine optimized to execute general computation graphs.

A set of higher-level tools is included: Spark SQL for queries and DataFrames, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX for graphs, Structured Streaming for streams, and a pandas-style API for existing pandas workloads. Together they let teams run batch analytics, machine learning and streaming jobs on a single engine and share code between them.

The README points to the project website for full documentation and programming guides, and it contains only basic setup and build instructions. Spark suits data engineers and data scientists who process datasets too large for a single machine, and organizations that want one framework for ETL, analytics and machine learning on clusters.

Dremio is a data analytics platform aimed at organizations that want to query and analyze large volumes of data without first moving or copying it into a separate, dedicated analytics database. It positions itself as filling a gap between raw data storage and the tools people need to get value out of that data.

The open-source edition can be built and run locally, exposing a web UI at localhost:9047 once started, or installed as a production tarball for server deployment, with an embedded mode also available. Building it requires a specific combination of JDK versions (21 as default, with 17 and 11 configured in the Maven toolchain for certain tests) plus Maven, reflecting a substantial, enterprise-grade Java codebase.

The README notes that to provide the best possible experience, the build includes some dependencies distributed under non-open-source licenses, so the fully open-source experience may differ slightly depending on build configuration. Dremio is written in Java and the open-source edition is released under the Apache-2.0 license, with full documentation hosted separately.