Databricks Buys Tabular – 1 Billion Dollar Deal. Iceberg vs Delta Lake?

The battle for the Data Warehouse, Data Lake, Lake House, or whatever you want to call it, in the age of AI just got more interesting. In an unsurprising move, Databricks has announced plans to buy Tabular for 1 billion dollars, beating out Snowflake who was reportedly trying to do the same thing.

It’s well known that Databricks and Snowflake see each other as bitter enemies, no matter what anyone tells you, and this definitely is yet another axe chop to the trunk of Snowflake, a sign that Databricks is indeed winning the AI and Data war one battle at a time.

Heck, even the fanatical and fanciful people over on r/dataengineering knew Snowflake was after something a while ago.

What is going on, what is the backstory?

In case you’re a hobbit who lives in a hobbit hole and you’re not up-to-speed on what the new war being waged between Snowflake and Databricks is, what it has to do with Delta Lake and Iceberg, why would Databricks consider buying Tabular out from under Snowflake, or why you should care … let me pontificate.

Data is the new (yet again) Gold in the AI Age.

Think about it for a minute. Both Databricks and Snowflake at their core sell a platform on which you can ingest, store, and transform vast amounts of data for various use cases, including AI etc. The world churns and burns on data, there is a lot of money to be made on data itself, and the tools used to mung around that data into something useful, to build products etc.

So, both Databricks and combines like Snowflake of course have an interest in the various tooling, INCLUDING OPEN SOURCE TOOLING, that has been built up over these last many years in the data-crazy world we live in.

Everyone wants to have their fingers in as many data pots as possible, to be in control, OR to give the impression of being in control, or to have the ability to INFLUENCE and be the real leader and/or thought leader in the data storage space.

Who is Tabular?

Who is Tabular and why would Databricks want to beat Snowflake to punch with them?

Tabular is more or less a managed solution for Apache Iceberg (it was founded by the creators of Iceberg). So what?

Well, there is war being waged for who shall be crowned Ruler Supreme of the Lake House in the cloud. The two main competitors are Delta Lake and Iceberg. Databricks has clearly gone all in on Delta Lake, it’s an absolute critical component of their Platform.

People care about what Platform is on top and who is using what. Companies care, and Engineers care.

If you can’t simply buy Apache Iceberg (since it’s an Apache Project), and you are someone like Databricks who is all in on Delta Lake and you are worried about Iceberg and its wide adoption, the last thing you want is Snowflake, your biggest competitor, owning Tabular the managed version founded by the creators.

You want some sort of control. Fine, then simply by Tabular, it’s obvious.

Who is using Apache Iceberg?  Some big names.

“Apache Iceberg is an open-source project that’s used by many companies, including Airbnb, Apple, Expedia, LinkedIn, Adobe, Lyft, Salesforce, Citi, and Capital One. Data engineers, administrators, analysts, and scientists use Iceberg for different purposes” – AI Search

Databricks as a company had to take Iceberg seriously. Think about it, what if they could and will integrate Tabular, and by extension Apache Iceberg into their platform? That opens up a whole new arena that was not there before. A huge user base of Iceberg users would now be incentivized, or at least enticed to use Databricks … and NOT Snowflake as the default option.

Databricks is moving fast and ruthlessly in the Lake House storage format wars … and with this move … they are winning.