Databricks' $1 billion plus purchase of Tabular demonstrates Iceberg has won the data table format wars, according to rival data analytics and ML vendor Snowflake.
Amid confirming Q2 results of fiscal 2025 ended July 31, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said: “This is the end of the Betamax wars… with everybody centering around the one format that has broad support. We will continue to be a key player in this ecosystem to ensure that the format truly serves everybody and moves the industry forward.”
Early last year, The Register predicted that Iceberg was set to change the economics of cloud-based data analytics. And a little more than a year later, Databricks — developer of rival format Delta Lake — shelled out $1 billion for Tabular, founded by the people who developed Iceberg while working for Netflix. Recent reports suggest the figure could be closer to $2 billion, a staggering number for a startup founded in 2021 and until September last year employing 25 staff working remotely.
Snowflake sees Databricks’ Tabular acquisition as vindication of its Iceberg table format support, which promises to allow users to bring their analytics engine of choice to their data, without moving it into a distinct data warehouse. Snowflake began working on support for the format in 2022.
Ramaswamy told investors the acquisition of Tabular by Databricks would have no impact on the Iceberg project, which is an Apache open source project.
“This has contributors and program committee members from a number of cloud companies, the hyperscalers, but also other companies. We also have members within Snowflake. We very much intend for this to be an industry standard that we take a pretty significant role in shaping. From that perspective, we actually feel that the Tabular acquisition, in many ways, is a vindication of our strategy to bet on Iceberg because that was the format that was truly interoperable,” he said.
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For its part, Databricks has said it plans to work with the Delta Lake — a Linux Foundation project — and Iceberg communities to bring format compatibility. In the long term, it wants to “evolve” toward a single, open, and common standard of table format interoperability.
In its Q2 results, Snowflake posted $868.8 million in revenue, up 29 percent year-on-year. It reported an operating loss of $355.3 million. Shares fell more than 8 percent in extended trading yesterday, attributed to a failure to raise margin forecasts in line with revenue and underwhelming guidance.
Ramaswamy maintained that customer interactions were not affected by Mandiant revealing cybercriminals stole a "significant volume of records" from Snowflake's customer database.
“There's not really been any noticeable effect or delay in things like our ability to sign up customers or get… new customers or get existing customers to deploy new projects,” he said. ®