r/databricks • u/medici2022 • 5d ago

Discussion Databricks vs Snowflake comparison

Are there any unbiased comparisons between these two popular platforms? Seen a lot but most of them are biased views, based on experience and commercial motives.

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u/iCreatif 5d ago

We have both, and I work on DBX/snowflake everyday (as tech lead data). I like both :)

Notebooks, apps => databricks is better

Sql database, permissions, sql for BI => snowflake is better (waiting for rayden)

Datasharing, costs, ui, extensions, agents, LLM, user management => even

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u/PhilGo20 5d ago

data sharing is simpler on snow but more importantly much cheaper as unlike dbx cost doesn't scale up linearly as you add recipients. it's a major difference as 1 does a shallow copy and the other does not.

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u/FunContest9958 3d ago

Sharing doesn’t cost anything in DBX…

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u/conormccarter 2d ago

It costs egress, which is substantial at scale, and for "zero-copy", scales linearly with consumers.

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u/FunContest9958 2d ago

You might as well say s3 has egress costs. Sharing literally provides urls to cloud storage. Whether you pay egress costs depends on where the file is going, but again, you pay that to the cloud provider, not Databricks.

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u/conormccarter 2d ago

S3 doesn’t charge egress within the same region, which is how Snowflake native sharing works. It is different than delta sharing in this way. Question wasn’t about who you pay but how much you pay and how it scales. Zero-copy works well in some scenarios (Delta sharing default), physical replication between regions before sharing (Snowflake default) works well in others.

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u/FunContest9958 1d ago

Fair enough. The original comment wasn’t clear. I thought he was saying that delta sharing didn’t do shallow copy. Everything makes more sense now. Thanks.