A rare two-part compare and contrast!
First, Chen Hirsh directly contrasts Microsoft Fabric and Databricks:
Microsoft recently announced the general availability of Microsoft Fabric, which contains all (or most) cloud Data analytics services from Microsoft. This is a good opportunity to compare it with another popular data platform, which is also available in Azure (and other cloud services) – Databricks.
Before we start, I should note that Fabric is quite new, and it’s still hard to evaluate its performance and stability. Also, both products have many features, and I only try to discuss the main differences.
Then, Eugene Meidinger keys us in on the similarities:
One of the things that helps to understand Fabric is that it’s heavily influenced by Databricks. It’s built on delta lake, which is created and open sourced by Databricks 2019. You are encouraged to use a medallion architecture, which as far as I can tell, comes from Databricks.
You will be a lot less frustrated if you realize that much of what’s going on with Fabric is a blend of open source formats and protocols, but also is a combination of the idiosyncrasies of Databricks and then those of Microsoft. David Gomes has good post about data lake file formats, and it’s interesting to imagine the parallel universe where Fabric is built on Iceberg (which is also based on Parquet files) instead of delta lake. (Note, I found this post from this week’s issue of Brent Ozar’s Newsletter)