Performance Comparison: Arbutus vs. The Competition

Processing speed is a key factor for audit groups performing data analytics on large data sets. Whether you are dealing with ‘Big Data’ or just large data, there is no reason today to be hampered by your software.

We performed benchmark tests of various types of analyses to compare Arbutus desktop and server products to our competitor’s latest version 10 desktop. As the graph below shows, Arbutus technology is equal or faster in every category; in some cases, dramatically so. The cumulative time of all the tests using Analyzer desktop is less than half of the competition’s version 10 (46 minutes vs. 97 minutes), making Arbutus more than twice as fast, while Arbutus server achieves even faster overall performance (39 minutes vs. 97 minutes).

All tests below are measured in seconds. Shorter bars are better, obviously.

All tests above are measured in seconds. It is interesting to note that the largest differences relate to the competitor’s recently implemented features, fuzzy duplicates and DateTime support. While we have made every effort to provide a representative range of data, results can vary widely from command to command, as is obvious from the graph. This is why Arbutus makes all its technology available for evaluation and benchmark testing on your own data.

The comparisons were made using only functionality supported by both products. For example, we specifically omitted comparing two files with the Compare command, normalizing data for the fuzzy comparisons and SQL joins. While most commands were typically 20% or more faster than the competition’s “performance improved” version 10, some aspects of the performance differences bear special mention. If you require this functionality, then the differences are very pronounced:

Importing
XML: 74 times faster
Delimited/CSV: Instantaneous
XLS/XLSX: 2 times faster

Exporting
XML: 4 times faster
XLS/XLSX: 3 times faster

Fuzzy matching: 11 to 500 times faster

Use of time fields: 2 to 3 times faster

Notes:
1) In Arbutus, Import CSV takes zero time, regardless of file size, as delimited data is read directly.
2) Our Duplicates command is compared to their FUZZYDUP.
3) As their FUZZYDUP command does not support ‘same’ fields, we have concatenated the three keys.

 About the Tests:

• Test computer specs: Dell I7-920, 2.67GHz, Windows 64 bit, 9GB RAM, 1TB disk

• Most reads use a 125,000,000 record, 80 bytes long transaction file (10GB data size)

• Fuzzy duplicates tests use a 50,000 record address file

• Exports are 5,000,000 records, except Excel, which is 650,000

• Imports are all 650,000 records

• We chose 125 million records because most people interested in performance have big data. For comparison, Arbutus also ran the “big data” tests (Join through Summarize) on a 5 million record file as well. Analyzer took 50 seconds in total, while the competitor’s version 10 took 89 seconds (the graph lines were too small to show individually).

Click here to see the actual commands used in Arbutus V5.5 and the competitor’s V10 desktop.

Being the fastest audit software is only part of the Arbutus Advantage. Discover more reasons to like Arbutus.