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by avip 1681 days ago
I've used both products in production. Both are good++.

The blog wars seem extremely ridiculous to me. I don't recall ever choosing one over another based on how fast it runs on some imaginary arbitrary dataset.

3 comments

Manufactured rivalries can be a great thing for business. We have been debating Coke vs Pepsi, Nike vs Reebok, McDonald's vs Burger King for decades now while these companies laugh all the way to the bank.
Like the post but I would add "Ford v Ferrari" there. A synthetic 100T test is much like an F1 course - not something you deal with during your commute, but it's nice to know what the limit is, and that there are people pushing that limit.
Its not ridiculous at all. This is the coming of age for a brand new data architecture.

One of the biggest FUDs for a data lake architecture is performance - and this benchmark should put that concern to rest.

I actually see them as variations on the same architecture. Databricks keeps their metadata in files, Snowflake keeps theirs in a database, but they both, ultimately, are querying data stored in a columnar format on blob store (and, to be fair, Snowflake have been doing that with ACID-compliant SQL for a lot longer than Databricks). So using SQL over blob at high performance has been around for a while.

Databricks say their solution is better because it's open (though keep the optimizations you need to run this at scale to themselves, i.e. is ultimately proprietary). Snowflake says theirs is better because it's a fully managed service, meaning no infrastructure to procure or manage, is fully HA across multiple data centers by default etc.

Databricks push 'open' but really still want you to use their proprietary tech for first transforming into something usable (Parquet/Delta) and then querying with Photon/SQL, though you can also use other tech. With Snowflake you can just ingest and query, but it has to be through their engine.

Customers should do their own valudation and see which one fits their needs best.

I don’t know, “coming of age” seems to imply that there’s some pre-maturity period out of which something is emerging.
It was inevitable.

Both Databricks and Snowflake have inflated marketing budgets, and marketing feels they have to "beat" the other one or they'll lose the market.