Databricks

The Data Lakehouse is an architecture that combines data lake storage (cheap, scalable object storage like S3) with data warehouse capabilities (ACID transactions, schema enforcement, fast SQL queries). Before the Lakehouse, organizations ran two separate systems: a data lake for raw ML/data science work and a data warehouse for BI/reporting — requiring complex ETL pipelines between them and double the storage costs. Databricks invented Delta Lake (open-source) to bring warehouse-quality guarantees (atomic commits, rollback, schema evolution, time travel) to data lake storage, enabling a single system for all workloads. Delta Lake is now the most widely adopted open table format, with competitors Iceberg (Netflix/Apache) and Hudi (Uber) offering similar capabilities.

Choose Databricks if your team's primary work is data engineering (ETL pipelines, streaming), data science (Python/R notebooks, ML training), or you need to run Apache Spark workloads — Databricks' Spark-native environment, ML infrastructure (MLflow, Feature Store), and Delta Lake are superior for these use cases. Choose Snowflake if your primary use case is SQL analytics and BI dashboards — Snowflake's SQL performance, concurrency handling, and data sharing (Snowflake Marketplace) are best-in-class, and it requires less engineering expertise to administer. Many large organizations run both: Databricks for data engineering and ML, Snowflake for BI and executive reporting. The two platforms now increasingly compete on each other's turf (Databricks SQL, Snowpark for Python).

Databricks the company is not open source, but it has contributed several major open-source projects: Apache Spark (the distributed computing framework at its core), Delta Lake (the open table format enabling ACID transactions on object storage), MLflow (the ML experiment tracking and model registry platform), and Delta Sharing (open protocol for cross-platform data sharing). These projects are Apache-licensed and can be used independently without Databricks. The Databricks Lakehouse Platform is the commercial managed service built on these open-source foundations — it adds a collaborative UI, automated cluster management, Unity Catalog governance, enterprise security, and SLA support. DBRX, Databricks' open-source LLM released in 2024, is also freely available.