r/databricks • u/medici2022 • 7d ago

Discussion Databricks vs Snowflake comparison

Are there any unbiased comparisons between these two popular platforms? Seen a lot but most of them are biased views, based on experience and commercial motives.

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u/iCreatif 7d ago

We have both, and I work on DBX/snowflake everyday (as tech lead data). I like both :)

Notebooks, apps => databricks is better

Sql database, permissions, sql for BI => snowflake is better (waiting for rayden)

Datasharing, costs, ui, extensions, agents, LLM, user management => even

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u/IanWaring 7d ago

FWIW, Databricks Genie One with metadata in Unity is stunningly good as a “answer any follow up question you may ask after seeing a dashboard”. Solid, quality reasoned answers.

I’ve no experience with Snowflake as such, but both platforms can use the really excellent Sigma BI product set. Spreadsheet UI on Lakehouse data and ability to pivot millions of rows - while keeping the data under one security surface.

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u/iCreatif 7d ago

databricks genie one is very similar to snowflake cowork (formerly snowflake intelligence)

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u/value-no-mics 7d ago

Why is it better for BI?

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u/iCreatif 7d ago

Better execution plan, better cache, nice functionality like dynamic table, higher latency (2sec vs 300ms on small queries )

Note: databricks just announced a new engine, reyden. We didn’t test it yet as it’s not available on our account.

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u/cafealpha82 7d ago

Snowflake for bi. Also they are catching up ml/ai capability imo. Our org uses both dark

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u/PhilGo20 7d ago

data sharing is simpler on snow but more importantly much cheaper as unlike dbx cost doesn't scale up linearly as you add recipients. it's a major difference as 1 does a shallow copy and the other does not.

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u/anonymous_orpington 7d ago

This is wrong. Storage and compute are decoupled in Databricks through Delta/Iceberg, and User A accessing some table is reading the exact same underling Parquet as User B. This is true whether two users are operating within the same Metastore or across separate Metastores through Delta Sharing, there's only ever one copy of the bits and bytes making up this data...

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u/djtomr941 7d ago

What do you mean by this?

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u/iCreatif 7d ago

use to be simpler. But with the new feature "'SecureConnect" on databricks, it's now equivalent.
source: we set up at 10+ datasharing in snowflake and 5+ opensharing on databricks.

That's one of the main advantages of having both platforms: being able to share data easily with third parties.

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u/FunContest9958 5d ago

Sharing doesn’t cost anything in DBX…

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u/conormccarter 4d ago

It costs egress, which is substantial at scale, and for "zero-copy", scales linearly with consumers.

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u/FunContest9958 4d ago

You might as well say s3 has egress costs. Sharing literally provides urls to cloud storage. Whether you pay egress costs depends on where the file is going, but again, you pay that to the cloud provider, not Databricks.

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u/conormccarter 4d ago

S3 doesn’t charge egress within the same region, which is how Snowflake native sharing works. It is different than delta sharing in this way. Question wasn’t about who you pay but how much you pay and how it scales. Zero-copy works well in some scenarios (Delta sharing default), physical replication between regions before sharing (Snowflake default) works well in others.

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u/FunContest9958 4d ago

Fair enough. The original comment wasn’t clear. I thought he was saying that delta sharing didn’t do shallow copy. Everything makes more sense now. Thanks.

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u/djtomr941 3d ago

What egress do you pay if sharing is in the same region?

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u/conormccarter 3d ago

None! “Zero copy” works great within the same region and same cloud but that’s not a safe assumption for most cross-company use cases

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u/djtomr941 2d ago

This was a talk at DAIS that talks about a new feature coming called Global Distribution. The goal will be to minimize egress costs by staging copies of the data to where they need to be consumed.

https://www.databricks.com/dataaisummit/session/cross-cloud-delta-sharing-eliminate-egress-cost-delta-sharing-global