Databricks to Buy Data-Management Startup Tabular

Databricks to Buy Data-Management Startup Tabular(wsj.com)

95 points by dpurp 1 year ago | 22 comments

jonnat 1 year ago |

So, will Databricks deprioritize Delta Lake in favor or Iceberg, or will they try to derail Iceberg development now they they got the team that originally built it at Netflix?

Edit: from the Tabular CEO announcement

  Databricks reached out to me and proposed a collaboration that could bring Iceberg and Delta closer together [...] I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with Databricks and the broader Delta community to build better table formats together.

So it seems they are going for the latter.

indoordin0saur 1 year ago | |

Doesn't it sound like they'll try and move the two formats closer together so that there isn't such a format war? IDK how it would benefit Databricks to ruin either format if they're now such huge stakeholders in them both.

Either way, I just want to know which format to pick. I've been chief data engineer at my current company for about a year and would like to be able to move off of plain parquet files in my lake but I'm not sure what table format to choose.

waterlx 1 year ago | | |

Hi, in case you did not find the answer yet. In my hamble opinion: - choose Iceberg: If you have several computing/query engines other than Spark, like Presto, Flink. Iceberg has a great extraction and design for a engine-independent table format. But its learning cost is relative high - choose Delta: If you only have Spark and would like to be deeply binded with Databricks - choose Hudi: If you would like to use data lake out-of-the-box and it is quite easy to use. - If your data is updated frequently, like streaming, check https://paimon.apache.org/ if you would like to be deeply binded with Flink

TheCleric 1 year ago | |

At the Databricks Summit keynote this morning they pitched it as a way of trying to standardize and bridge across the two more easily, with neither going away.

datadrivenangel 1 year ago | |

So Delta will eventually become better but not before Databricks gets a year or three of advantage over iceberg and open source delta.

artwr 1 year ago |

Sounds like a really good move by Databricks, in particular because a lot of the main platforms had implementations of catalogs to the Iceberg Spec, and several vendors, Snowflake included was starting to support Iceberg as an external Table format.

I have similar questions about the future of Delta Lake, but not really about the future of Iceberg, that's what the Apache Foundation is for after all. There are enough large enterprise players relying on this (Apple, Netflix, ...) to keep the project going for a while.

djoldman 1 year ago |

Tabular statement:

https://tabular.io/blog/tabular-is-joining-databricks/

Centigonal 1 year ago | |

Here is Databricks's as well:

https://www.databricks.com/blog/databricks-tabular

Pils 1 year ago |

Seems bad for Snowflake? Iceberg is a big part of Snowflake's data lake offering, and I assumed it was a Snowflake-originated OSS project until this announcement (all Snowflake products have snow related names).

chimerasaurus 1 year ago | |

Disclaimer - I am James on this[1] blog.

Yesterday we announced Polaris specifically so (1) customers don't get locked into a catalog; (2) people know Snowflake works with AWS, Azure, Confluent, etc.

1: https://www.snowflake.com/blog/introducing-polaris-catalog/

seahckr 1 year ago | | |

This [1] says Snowflake was also bidding to buy Tabular.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/04/databricks-is-buying-data-op...

zwaps 1 year ago | | |

Awfully many coming soons in that article

jetru 1 year ago | |

Iceberg is not Snowflake originated, it was built by folks at Netflix - the same folks who built Tabular.

But yes, this is definitely bad for Snowflake, Databricks can position itself as a very strong competitor with this move and moving more towards Iceberg.

indoordin0saur 1 year ago | | |

So this makes it sound like a positive thing for Iceberg as a format. Others seem to be suggesting that DataBricks will be working to undermine the format in favor of their older Delta Lake format but that seems overly cynical.

jamesblonde 1 year ago |

I was at MySQL when Oracle bought lowly Innobase (3 people), but it was the open-source tech that MySQL built on. MySQL subsequently tried to build their own transaction engine (Falcon), but failed. This deal feels like Oracle = Databricks, Snowflake = MySQL

The big difference - innodb got like 3m, Tabular 1bn!

ec109685 1 year ago |

9 months ago! https://tabular.io/blog/the-case-for-independent-storage/

enether 1 year ago | |

money speaks louder than words

it was an amazing sales pitch though

Databricks reached out to me and proposed a collaboration that could bring Iceberg and Delta closer together [...] I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with Databricks and the broader Delta community to build better table formats together.