Thanks Snowflake for removing the DeWitt clause, makes performance comparison more transparent. Would be best for Snowflake to complete official/audited TPC-DS benchmark so customers can compare apples to apples.
Databricks response to Snowflake's accusation of lacking integrity
31–40 of 168 posts
Re: Databricks response to Snowflake's accusation of lacking integrity
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Databricks results are available at tpc.org [1] Snowflake has shown NOTHING close to this. [1] http://tpc.org/results/fdr/tpcds/databricks~tpcds~100000~dat...
Yes, I wasn't saying they were lying about their tpc.org posted results. I'm saying both companies made use of clever indirection, wording, presentations of stats, etc. Like price/performance, and which of your competitor's tier's to select when doing that, and which of your own. Or over-provisioning the competition's setup, for example.
Ahh, fair enough there. That said, snowflake would help their case if they would actually do at least one actual tpc.org third party result
Re: Databricks response to Snowflake's accusation of lacking integrity
#33so, alternatives? Aside from the Azure/GCP/AWS internal offeringa I know about Snowflake and Firebolt, Databricks is new to me.
maybe clickhouse?
Clickhouse is good if you're building application. It has lot of great features and incredible performance, but there's an expectancy that people using it know what they're doing and can work around its limitations (like limited support for joins and sql in general).
Something like Snowflake works much better when you're building a platform that you can give to two hundred data analysts or various skills spread over fifty teams, so they can build their own stuff. The nice UI, broad feature set (materialized views, time travel, automatic backups, superfast scaling up and down, ...) and general just-work-iness makes it nice for that, but you're going to pay for the privilege.
Databricks is somewhere in the middle - things are way less polished, features don't always work and you still have to figure out things like backups and partitions on S3 on your own, but some people like that. Expect to also pay a pretty penny for hundreds of Spark clusters nobody knows who uses.
Re: Databricks response to Snowflake's accusation of lacking integrity
#34As much as I love seeing competition in the space and am enjoying my popcorn, I really don't understand what Databricks is doing here: this feels like a childish foodfight rather than an obsession with the customer...
All publicity is good publicity.
Both participants in a fight can win by implicitly excluding their real competitors.
Re: Databricks response to Snowflake's accusation of lacking integrity
#35This reminds me of the old performance ads of Oracle where they would show you how everything ran better on Oracle. They used to put those ads at airports, business lounges and the back cover of newspapers and magazines read by non-technical executives like the FT and Economist. Everyone technical knew they would game every environment to come out with superior results. I suppose it worked. As the top executives buy…
A key part of the Oracle strategy is making it a breach of license to publish any benchmarking data. No performance data about Oracle's database is allowed to be published without their approval, which means no negative results are published.
They also sue you for so many other reasons. It's like the management hierarchy joke that Oracle is a litigious law firm with a sales team.
Re: Databricks response to Snowflake's accusation of lacking integrity
#36Databricks is a rapidly approaching IPO. Trying to justify their valuation with their overpriced in-memory hadoop.
Databricks is way more than hadoop or spark. A great analogy - Spark is a great engine but you need to design and build all of the other subsystems. Databricks is an F1 car - everything is built out. You get in and drive - FAST.
Databricks is a shit platform that encourages terrible data practices and accretion of technical debt.
Re: Databricks response to Snowflake's accusation of lacking integrity
#37I'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.
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.
Re: Databricks response to Snowflake's accusation of lacking integrity
#38As much as I love seeing competition in the space and am enjoying my popcorn, I really don't understand what Databricks is doing here: this feels like a childish foodfight rather than an obsession with the customer...
Databricks is not known for the SQL/DW space. The original blog was focused on breaking the TPC-DS performance record and provide validation of the Lakehouse architecture. DB didn't ask for a war of words with Snowflake - SF dedicated a whole response stating DB lacked integrity and filled it with false and misleading information. I commend DB for responding back (only because of the integrity accusations). Snowflake has asked for this response by acting petty from the outset
Re: Databricks response to Snowflake's accusation of lacking integrity
#39Before the Snowflake blog post, I did not know what Snowflake or Databricks were. I can only imagine that this rivalry is great for both of them, even if Databricks is somewhat on the advantage end, at least from a tactical standpoint; I admit though that they seem to be a bit unnecessarily defensive considering the position they're in with the exchange.
In general though, I'm still not complaining. It's interesting to see a dispute like this unfold.
Re: Databricks response to Snowflake's accusation of lacking integrity
#40so, alternatives? Aside from the Azure/GCP/AWS internal offeringa I know about Snowflake and Firebolt, Databricks is new to me.
Redshift is pretty terrible, stay away. AWS is even worse at delivering promises than Databricks and that's saying something.
I heard Google BigQuery is good. It is completely SaaS (like AWS Athena that works).
Unicorns often run their own stack and you could replicate that, if you have the apetite. Netflix and Apple run Trino + Spark on k8s + Iceberg. Uber used their own Hudi thing, not sure if they still do.