Databricks seems on a convergent evolution towards Snowflake, between the two of them I’d rather be starting at the position Snowflake is versus Databricks.
They are both going towards the "Data Lakehouse" end point which is driving some of the convergence. Silly term, but basically providing analytics and a database type experience over a data lake.
That said, Databricks is a much broader platform, with all of the collaboration environments and is generally much more programmable than Snowflake.
> providing analytics and a database type experience over a data lake.
It's interesting how the modern data lake is developing in this way, recreating many patterns from the traditional database for distributed systems and massive scale: SQL and query optimization, transactions and time travel, schema evolution and data constraints...
Having started out as a database developer / DBA many years ago, working with data lakes today reminds me in many ways of that early part of my career.
I wrote a post tracing a common interface from the typical relational database to the modern data lake.
That said, Databricks is a much broader platform, with all of the collaboration environments and is generally much more programmable than Snowflake.