▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ 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: https://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 (https://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.