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All Eyes on Snowflake and Databricks in 2022 Posted on : Jan 22 - 2022

It’s hard to overstate the impact that Snowflake and Databricks have had on the data industry, for customers, partners, and competitors. As data practitioners gear up for 2022, they’re keeping a watchful eye upon these two independent powerhouses to determine what comes next.

The explosive growth of Snowflake and Databricks over the past couple of years is remarkable for several reasons. For starters, that growth comes as the three major public cloud providers from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have consolidated their market reach, becoming three of the biggest companies in the world with a mind boggling $5.5 trillion in collective market capitalization. The fact that the much smaller operations of Snowflake and Databricks have not only managed to maintain their independence, but to grow in such a climate relative to the cloud partners they depend on, is a testament to the companies’ execution.

Databricks’ Growth

Databricks, which was founded in 2013, has parlayed its early position as the commercial entity behind Apache Spark into a trusted cloud data platform that goes well beyond Spark. When the fortunes of a similar open source framework, Apache Hadoop, crashed and burned in 2019, Databricks’ pivot away from a single technology looks prescient.

Today, Databricks is arguably known best for its lakehouse platform, which blends the unstructured storage and processing capabilities of a data lake (like Hadoop or S3) with the structured storage an processing chops of traditional data warehouses. Largely through its Delta Lake offering, Databricks is credited with popularizing the lakehouse concept, which is slowly being adopted by the cloud giants, including AWS and Google. (Databricks has a closer partnership with Microsoft, which has leaned on Databricks for Spark expertise as well as Delta Lake. Databricks entire offering has only been available on Google Cloud for about a year.)

Databricks arguably has focused more on data science and data engineering that data analytics in the past, but that is starting to change. In late 2021, it went GA with its Databricks SQL offering, which brings the ANSI SQL standard to bear on data that’s stored in its lakehouse. View More