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Snowflake’s response to Databricks’ TPC-DS post

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Re: Snowflake’s response to Databricks’ TPC-DS post

#71
post #57
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Personally I think it’s a great response and very well written. I didn’t jump on the congrats-Databricks wagon when the result first came out because of the weird front page comparison against snowflake. Both companies are doing great work. Focusing on building a better product for your customer is much more meaningful than making your competitor look bad.

It is well written, but there's some sleight of hand here and there too. Like using your lowest tier product to demonstrate price/performance against a competitor's highest tier. The Snowflake lowest tier doesn't have failover, for example...or compliance features.

Exactly. That’s why I think public benchmark war is just a waste of time. There will ALWAYS be some subtle differences between the two platforms that results will never be apple to apple.

Re: Snowflake’s response to Databricks’ TPC-DS post

#72

"Posting benchmark results is bad because it quickly becomes a race to the wrong solution. But somebody showed us sucking on a benchmark, so here's our benchmark results showing we're better."

I disagree. It makes sense for Snowflake to response to what-they-think-is an unreasonably bad result published by Databricks. And they focused more on Snowflake’s result and only compared dollar cost against Databricks. It’s consistent with their philosophy that public benchmark war is beside the point and mostly a distraction.

Re: Snowflake’s response to Databricks’ TPC-DS post

#73
post #68
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, but if I see the term 'data lake' I'm gonna Bing it, with the first result being https://aws.amazon.com/big-data/datalakes-and-analytics/what... which explains it nicely. ELI5 is for reddit, generally here we expect you can google it to get the ELI5 explanation before giving us your hot take in a comment

It’s probably just me but the distinction between datalake and data warehouse seems like splitting hairs. Unstructured data can always be stored on structure databases. What’s the main reason for both to coexist?

It used to be that way. Old data warehouses (built on relational dbs) couldn't handle large scale data, and old data lakes used to be hard to use (write a map-reduce job to query data).

It is barely true nowadays.

Re: Snowflake’s response to Databricks’ TPC-DS post

#74

* Databricks is unethical * Nobody should benchmark anymore, just focus on customers instead * But hey, we just did some benchmarks and we look better than what Databricks claims * Btw, please sign up and do some benchmarks on Snowflake, we actually ship TPC-DS dataset with Snowflake * Btw, we agree with Databricks, let's remove the DeWitt clause, vendors should be able to benchmark each other! * Consistency is more…

If people have never heard of Databricks, now is the time because a 100 billion company just started a war against them. Great marketing win Databricks.

Databricks is $28B valuation and 2800 employees, Snowflake is $109 valuation and 2500 employees.

They are both billion dolar companies, we're hardly talking David and Goliath here.

Re: Snowflake’s response to Databricks’ TPC-DS post

#75
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people have never heard of Databricks, now is the time because a 100 billion company just started a war against them. Great marketing win Databricks.

Databricks is $28B valuation and 2800 employees, Snowflake is $109 valuation and 2500 employees. They are both billion dolar companies, we're hardly talking David and Goliath here.

for DB that's old number - recent valuation is $38B

Re: Snowflake’s response to Databricks’ TPC-DS post

#76
post #68
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, but if I see the term 'data lake' I'm gonna Bing it, with the first result being https://aws.amazon.com/big-data/datalakes-and-analytics/what... which explains it nicely. ELI5 is for reddit, generally here we expect you can google it to get the ELI5 explanation before giving us your hot take in a comment

It’s probably just me but the distinction between datalake and data warehouse seems like splitting hairs. Unstructured data can always be stored on structure databases. What’s the main reason for both to coexist?

History matters here and I don't know how well this is documented, but: data warehouses have been around since the 70s or so, data lake is a newer term. Data warehouses came from an era where nearly all data was stored in the database itself (typically Oracle), owned and controlled by a single or few groups, and there were only a few databases, which were the source of truth (the two databases would normally be a transaction engine handling real time load (just what's required to authorize a credit card transaction, for example), and a "warehouse" which contained all the long-term data like every transaction that had ever occurred.

Data lakes are more modern and came about as people realized they had 30 databases and the business wanted to do queries against all of them simultaneously (IE, join your credit card transaction history with historical rates of default in a zip code), quickly. The data warehouse solution was to use federated database queries (JOINs across databases), or force everybody to consolidate. A data lake is a single virtual entity that represents "all your data in one place".

It's based on a weak analogy where a warehouse is a place where you put stuff in very well organized locations while a lake is a place where a bunch of different waters slosh together.

Storing unstructured data in a database is dumb because databases cost about 10X storage space due to indexing, while unstructured data often can just sit around passively in a filesystem (and/or have a filesystem index built into it for fast queries).

I view this through the lens of web tech, for example, see the wars between the mapreduce and database people and how Google evolved from MapReduce against GFS to Flumes against Spanner, showing we just live in an endless cycle of renaming old technology.

It's absolutely correct that the terminology doesn't map perfectly

Re: Snowflake’s response to Databricks’ TPC-DS post

#77
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. Simplicity is critical. That’s why we built Databricks SQL not based on Spark. As a matter of fact, we took the extreme approach of not allowing customers (or ourselves) to set any of the known knobs. We want to force ourselves to build the best the system to run well out of the box and yet still beats data warehouses in price perf. The official result involved no tuning. It was partitioned by date, loaded d…

>That’s why we built Databricks SQL not based on Spark. Wait... really? The sales folks I've been talking to didn't mention this. I assumed that when I ran SQL inside my Python, it was decomposed into Spark SQL with weird join problems (and other nuances I'm not fully familiar with). Not that THAT would have changed my mind. But it would have changed the calculus of "who uses this tool at my company" and "who do I ge…

it's different - rxin talks about this: https://databricks.com/product/databricks-sql

when you run Python, it's on Spark, although you now can use Photon engine that is used for DB SQL by default

Re: Snowflake’s response to Databricks’ TPC-DS post

#78
post #76
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s probably just me but the distinction between datalake and data warehouse seems like splitting hairs. Unstructured data can always be stored on structure databases. What’s the main reason for both to coexist?

History matters here and I don't know how well this is documented, but: data warehouses have been around since the 70s or so, data lake is a newer term. Data warehouses came from an era where nearly all data was stored in the database itself (typically Oracle), owned and controlled by a single or few groups, and there were only a few databases, which were the source of truth (the two databases would normally be a tra…

This was really helpful, too. Thanks!

Re: Snowflake’s response to Databricks’ TPC-DS post

#79

Take all the problems you have had with data warehousing and throw them in a proprietary cloud. That is Snowflake. They are the best today. Databricks started with the cloud datalake, sitting natively on parquet and using cloud native tools, fully open. Recently they added SQL to help democratize the data in the data lake versus moving it back and forth into a proprietary data warehouse. The selling point in Databric…

Delta lake is not meaningfully more "open" than whatever Snowflake (or BigQuery and Redshift) are doing. It does not require any less "moving data around"

With all these, the data sits on cloud storage and compute is done by cloud machines - the difference between Databricks and the others is that with Databricks, you can take a look at that bucket. But you're not going to be able to do much with that data without paying for Databricks compute, since the open source Delta library is not usable in real world.

Since commercial data warehouses are an enterprise product for enterprise companies (small companies can use stick with normal databases or SaaS and unicorns seem to roll their own with Presto/Trino, Iceberg, Spark and k8s, nowadays), the vendor and the product needs to be most of all reliable partner. And Databricks behavior does not inspire confidence of them being that.

If I'm outsourcing my analytical platform to a vendor, I want the to be almost boring. Not some growth hacking, guerilla marketing, sketchy benchmark posting techbros.

At the end of the day, anyone making years lasting million dollar decisions in this space should run their own evaluation. Our evaluation showed that there's a noticeable gap between what Databricks promises and what they deliver. I have not worked with Snowflake to compare.

Re: Snowflake’s response to Databricks’ TPC-DS post

#80
I genuinely think DeWitt clause is good for the users (bad for researchers). Without it, especially in the context of cooperate competitions, the company with the most marketing power will win. Users can always compare different products themselves. I am likely wrong but please help me understand.
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