Databricks Follows Cloudera by Adopting Iceberg, Whereas Snowflake Mulls Open Supply Method

Posted in Enterprise |
June 07, 2024 3 min learn

A continuing move of breaking information from the information lakehouse house is making notable tech headlines this week.

On Tuesday, Databricks introduced that it’ll purchase Tabular, an information administration firm based by the creators of Apache Iceberg, Ryan Blue, Daniel Weeks, and Jason Reidfor. The deal was for an unconfirmed sum, however some experiences counsel that quantity to be between $1B and $2B (and allegedly outbidding Snowflake). The transfer goals to unify the 2 hottest open-souce lakehouse codecs — Apache Iceberg and Linux Basis Delta Lake — to boost knowledge compatibility throughout completely different codecs.

The prior day, Snowflake – nonetheless coping with the aftermath of final week’s knowledge breach – introduced Polaris Catalog, a vendor-neutral, open catalog for Apache Iceberg. The corporate additionally introduced at its annual consumer convention that Polaris Catalog will probably be open sourced within the subsequent 90 days.

So, how do you make sense of all these bulletins and what does this imply to you? 

Iceberg is the Champion within the Desk Format Warfare

Databricks placing this a lot worth in Iceberg is proof that Delta Lake has misplaced the desk format battle, and Iceberg is the clear winner. Iceberg will additional turn into, and can stay, the de facto customary for large-scale knowledge and analytics deployments for the long term. 

Cloudera was a first mover in adopting Iceberg as central and native to our knowledge, analytics, and AI platform – reinforcing our credibility as the very best vendor to work with whenever you need managed Iceberg knowledge estates, at scale, throughout all clouds and on-premises. 

How Open is Your Open Supply?

Regardless of its claims because the open knowledge lakehouse firm, Databricks is NOT well-known for being true to open supply. In contrast to Tabular, Databricks has made business variations as proprietary implementations of open supply know-how in a bid to retain buyer lock-in, and it’ll stay to be seen if this transfer adjustments that method. 

Cloudera is a impartial celebration that manages Iceberg with out vendor lock-in and at scale – in all clouds and on-premises. Cloudera additionally counts as clients lots of the different giant organizations that instantly contribute to the mission.  That’s really open supply.

Tabular Does Not Personal Iceberg

Tabular was based by the originators of the Iceberg mission. The corporate has about 20% of the Iceberg contributors and committers on employees (firms like AWS, Google, Dremio, Starburst, Adobe, Apple, Netflix, and extra), which make up the majority of the contributions. It has a wholesome neighborhood, in contrast to Delta Lake, and a whole lot of huge tech firms who’re invested in holding it open supply and vendor unbiased.

It is a dangerous and dear acquisition by Databricks, notably if the 80% of the committers resolve that different committer affiliations weaken the mission to stay open supply for all.

Welcome to the Occasion

Cloudera has been forward of this recreation for years. Our 2022 open lakehouse place weblog submit was basically the blueprint for the Databricks acquisition announcement. 

Iceberg has, and continues to be, central to Cloudera’s open knowledge lakehouse structure throughout hybrid clouds – not simply one thing for use on the facet. Databricks failed to realize adoption for Delta Lake from communities and third-party distributors, and now should make this BIG and dear wager. On the similar time, Snowflake’s Polaris catalog timing exhibits that they’ve been pressured into this house because the market and clients have moved Iceberg because the central desk format for his or her knowledge two years after Cloudera.

They’re each not solely late to affix the celebration, however will miss the enjoyable–and alternative–as they play catch as much as these of us who’ve been right here from the beginning.