Snowflake vs. Databricks: A deep dive

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Chapters ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
00:00 - Intros & Overview
1:00 - Background on Ian & Jeff
5:05 - Disclaimers
6:15 - Origin Stories of Snowflake and Databricks
25:06 - Use Cases & Features
50:47 - Is Databricks Cheaper?
54:01 - Your friend is spinning up a data platform at their company. Which do you recommend?
55:38 - Will companies continue to use both?
56:05 - Best acquisition?
57:31 - Biggest threat to each company?
58:33 - Wrap up & Summary
Learn more in the full blog post here: select.dev/posts/snowflake-vs...
Databricks & Snowflake are two of the most popular data cloud platforms in the market right now.
They started out solving very different use cases: Snowflake as the SQL data warehouse and Databricks as a managed Apache Spark service. They were even partners in the early days!
Today, they are both multi-faceted data cloud platforms solving a variety of different use cases. And, as a result, direct competitors.
Back on February 28, 2024, I had a conversation with Jeff Chou from Sync Computing. Jeff’s company works solely with Databricks customers, while we at SELECT (select.dev/) work solely with Snowflake customers.
Due to this nature, we thought it’d be fun to get together and have a genuine conversation about each platform. Neither of us was super familiar with the other platform, but were keen to learn more from each other.
This was an honest and unscripted conversation between two practitioners. No bullshit benchmarks. No marketing fluff.
We talked about their origin stories, the most common use cases we see from actual customers, their strengths and weaknesses, and where they’re both headed.

[@Rick-Blaine]

I've been looking for this kind of information! Great job! I also have a pretty strong distrust of Spark, and really almost anything that came out of the Hadoop world. In the early days of Snowflake I remember a customer story where their old data system had a huge backlog of work, and when they switched to Snowflake their back log dropped to almost nothing, AND they gave back 5 Java engineers to be used elsewhere in the company. Think about the cost of 5 Java engineers in your total cost of ownership.

[@Rick-Blaine]

I'm at the 52 min mark, and the discussion of spot instances, I'm looking forward to seeing how Snowflake "Serverless task Flex" develops.

[@NickEllis-nr6ot]

Great perspective. Create another list of discussion items and host another one.

[@leblu4306]

What about Snowflake vs Databricks vs AWS services comparison?

[@barryzhang8471]

very good stuff!! im also really interested in the work you do(snowflake cost optimization), would be great if you can make an episode on that!

[@MarkyGoldstein]

Thanks