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Comment by michaelhartm | Hacker News Reader

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michaelhartm

* Databricks is unethical

* Nobody should benchmark anymore, just focus on customers instead

* But hey, we just did some benchmarks and we look better than what Databricks claims

* Btw, please sign up and do some benchmarks on Snowflake, we actually ship TPC-DS dataset with Snowflake

* Btw, we agree with Databricks, let's remove the DeWitt clause, vendors should be able to benchmark each other!

* Consistency is more important than anything else!!!

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I don’t think they are saying benchmark is not important but rather public benchmark war being a distraction.

If people have never heard of Databricks, now is the time because a 100 billion company just started a war against them. Great marketing win Databricks.

To be fair, I've been equating Databricks for a month or so. Databricks is coming after Snowflake. Snowflake doesn't care. Snowflake has a pretty solid moat with:

EASY SQL, data sharing (they have a marketplace), simple scaling

You'll need to revisit this again. In the last two years Databricks has built a lead and a bigger moat. They're essentially nice chaps with a huge community backing them. And we all love their open source tools which essentially powers not only their big data platforms, but everyone else's too (AWS, GCP).

Databricks introduced an open source data sharing feature earlier this year. I don't know Databricks well enough to comment on the other two.

Databricks is $28B valuation and 2800 employees, Snowflake is $109 valuation and 2500 employees.

They are both billion dolar companies, we're hardly talking David and Goliath here.

for DB that's old number - recent valuation is $38B

The interesting part is that Snowflake omits Databricks' performance scores in their graphs. Here is how they compare on TPC-DS benchmark, based on two companies' self-reports:

* Elapsed time: 3108s (Databricks) vs 3760s (Snowflake)

* Price/Peformance: $242 (Databricks) vs $267 (Snowflake)

Needless to say, these numbers seriously need a verification by independent 3rd parties, but it seems that Databricks is still 18% faster and 10% cheaper than Snowflake?

The way I read this is: DataBricks benchmarked against us, and they messed it up. Here is hou YOU should evaluate Snowflake performance. And, by the way, it is pretty easy to do it.

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