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Snowflake and Databricks have emerged as the 2 knowledge warehousing behemoths of the cloud period, trudging away at one another to draw prospects and their large knowledge workloads. Maybe it’s not a coincidence, then, that the 2 distributors will holding their respective annual conferences in the identical San Francisco location, separated by every week, in early June.
Snowflake kicks issues off first with its Snowflake Summit 25, which is scheduled to happen on the Moscone Middle June 2-5. Known as the Knowledge Cloud Summit in earlier years, the Snowflake Summit this 12 months will attempt to exceed the attendance of final 12 months’s present, which introduced between 15,000 and 16,000 attendees to the downtown San Francisco location.
The main target for Summit 2025 shall be constructing and working large knowledge, superior analytics, and AI programs on Snowflake’s knowledge platform. Attendees who pay the final admission charge of $2,295 can have their choose of greater than 500 periods over 15 tracks, with greater than 190 distributors within the expo. The opening keynote, which shall be livestreamed beginning at 5 p.m. PT Monday, June 2, will characteristic Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy together with Lynn Martin, President of the New York Inventory Alternate Group, and Sam Altman, the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI.
Databricks follows up with its personal convention, the Knowledge + AI Summit, which takes place at Moscone Middle June 9-12. The corporate touted 16,000 attendees at its 2024 occasion, plus one other 40,000 attending nearly, and this 12 months, the corporate is estimating that 20,000 individuals will attend in particular person.
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Knowledge + AI Summit attendees who purchase a full ticket for $1,895 can have their choose of greater than 700 periods, which is able to concentrate on utilizing the Databricks platform to construct–you guessed it–large knowledge, superior analytics, and AI functions. JPMorgan Chase CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon and Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, will be a part of Databricks Co-Founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi on the stage through the Wednesday morning keynote, which shall be livestreamed beginning at 8 a.m. PT.
There was a ton of reports popping out of final 12 months’s Snowflake and Databricks conferences, a lot of it centering across the emergence of Apache Iceberg because the defacto business commonplace for giant knowledge desk codecs.
Snowflake, which had beforehand supported Iceberg, rolled out its open supply Polaris metadata catalog, which served because the REST-based glue that enabled Snowflake prospects to attach Iceberg tables to quite a lot of compute engines, together with Snowflake’s proprietary engine but in addition Trino, Dremio, Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Apache Doris, amongst others. Polaris is now incubating on the Apache Software program Basis, and seems on the right track to changing into one other commonplace for the category of expertise generally known as metadata catalogs (to not be confused with commonplace knowledge catalogs).
To not be outdone, Databricks introduced the acquisition of Tabular, the business Iceberg outfit based by the creators of the Apache Iceberg undertaking, throughout Snowflake’s 2024 convention. In welcoming the Iceberg workforce, Databricks unveiled a roadmap that referred to as for Apache Iceberg and its personal Delta Desk to finally merge, thereby eliminating the danger that prospects would select the “mistaken” desk format.
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The 2 occasions shook the large knowledge group in ways in which haven’t been seen because the collapse of Hadoop half-a-decade earlier. Giant organizations that had held off constructing next-generation large knowledge lakes based mostly on one of many open desk codecs immediately had a inexperienced gentle from the most important distributors that Iceberg was the winner. It was a large win for open platforms and for organizations who feared that knowledge platforms would maintain their knowledge hostage.
What’s going to the dueling Snowflake and Databricks occasions convey this 12 months? It’s unlikely we’ll expertise such a monumental as we did final 12 months, with the emergence of Iceberg and Polaris as business requirements. The group remains to be finding out the significance of desk codecs and metadata catalogs, so you’ll be able to anticipate to see fairly a little bit of content material round these matters.
The massive information this 12 months is prone to revolve round what everyone appears to be speaking about: Agentic AI. Know-how distributors are quickly rolling out methods to construct and coordinate massive numbers of AI brokers to deal with all kinds of duties, starting from customer support to writing and deploying code. It’s a very good guess that agentic AI would be the primary subject at each Snowflake and Databricks occasions this 12 months, though there at all times are surprises.
What are your ideas on the 2 conferences? On the Databricks versus Snowflake battle? As at all times, you’ll be able to tell us what you’re considering by dropping us a line at [email protected].
Associated Objects:
It’s Go Time for Open Knowledge Lakehouses
Snowflake Embraces Open Knowledge with Polaris Catalog
Databricks Nabs Iceberg-Maker Tabular to Spawn Desk Uniformity
