drawturkey

So if I stop paying Databricks, I can no longer use their proprietary query engine (Photon), right? I have to use something else, like Open Source Spark SQL which is slower and will cost a lot more money.

There are different ways to lock customers in and both Databricks and Snowflake are playing the game.

Agreed there is a small cost, but it is possible, which is at odds with your statement "with Snowflake, the data never comes out".

Not entirely true. There is a bi-directional Spark connector for Snowflake written by Databricks. And exporting your data in bulk out of Snowflake into any number of open formats is incredibly easy using the COPY INTO command. You can also use Snowflake on top of Parquet and even Delta Lake.

This is the problem. Both Snowflake and Databricks are spreading FUD and otherwise smart people are falling for it.

You nailed it. Meanwhile the rest of the world just needs a camry.

"Big" No, not really. They use Deltalake for the security use case, sure, but that pales in comparison to how much Iceberg they use.

This is very true. They make the lowest common denominator parts "open source" but control all of the commits. Also the query engine used for this benchmark is proprietary, closed source (Photon)

Snowflake has way more revenue, is worth 3 times more than Databricks and is growing faster. I'd say Snowflake is still in the lead. Plus, just look at Snowflake's customer list. It's a "who's who", Databricks is a "Who's that?".

Photon, which was used in their benchmark, is not open source. Don't be fooled by DB.

How do you get 700% markup? The difference between Standard and Enterprise is 50%. Enterprise does have features which do make workloads run faster, but this benchmark didn't need them.