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Benchmarking Databricks vs Snowflake

Mostafa Mokhtar, et al, respond to some benchmarking claims:

On Nov 2, 2021, we announced that we set the official world record for the fastest data warehouse with our Databricks SQL lakehouse platform. These results were audited and reported by the official Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) in a 37-page document available online at tpc.org. We also shared a third-party benchmark by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) outlining that Databricks SQL is significantly faster and more cost effective than Snowflake.

A lot has happened since then: many congratulations, some questions, and some sour grapes. We take this opportunity to reiterate that we stand by our blog post and the results: Databricks SQL provides superior performance and price performance over Snowflake, even on data warehousing workloads (TPC-DS).

Posts like this are exactly why getting rid of the DeWitt clause is important. I’d rather have Snowflake and Databricks duking it out with publicly-available and testable processes. When reading this, the most important part of this post was the several exhortations to try it out yourself, both for the Databricks test and the Snowflake test. Make benchmarking public, including hardware choices, configuration choices, and the testing process; then, I can tell for sure if your benchmark makes sense for my use case.

One Comment

  1. George Walkey
    George Walkey2021-11-18

    Its called Transparency
    Lets see which Vendors can Embrace and Extend on that 🙂 !!!

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