The relationship between Snowflake and Databricks can be compared to that of Google and Microsoft, with both companies competing in the same space and constantly trying to outdo each other. However, neither company is willing to admit that the other is ahead. Recently, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy sparked a heated debate by sharing his thoughts on the total cost of ownership (TCO) comparison between Snowflake and what he referred to as “Spark-based SaaS” solutions, taking a jab at Databricks. This led to discussions among the data engineering community, with both Snowflake and Databricks enthusiasts weighing in.
Ramaswamy highlighted Snowflake’s ease of use, which is true as the company has always focused on providing customers with easy-to-use platforms. However, this comes at the cost of complete control over customization, particularly with its automatic performance optimization. Ramaswamy claimed that this significantly reduces the need for resource-intensive tuning, which is a common requirement for Spark. He also pointed out that Snowflake is a fully managed SaaS platform, simplifying cloud infrastructure management for organizations.
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