Databricks promises cheap cloud data warehousing at an eighth of the cost of rivals

Databricks, the company born out of the Apache Spark boom, has let loose a raft of updates at its San Francisco conference, including an elastic compute option for analytics. Databricks SQL Serverless, available in preview on AWS, has been designed to improve query performance and concurrency of BI and analytics workloads on …

[Anonymous Coward]

"Park said the market for software vendors addressing analytic data problems was in a “Cambrian explosion” phase. “As these shifts occur, it would not be surprising to see new vendors arise to take on both Databricks and Snowflake..."

Surprising? It'd be totally shocking mate. The market's crashed and the PE money fountain is over. Nobody is going to be seriously challenging Databricks or Snowflake on matters of scale or breadth. Databricks have closed over $3.5Bn in pre-IPO funding, Snowflake closed something like $2.1Bn then did their probably-never-to-be-matched IPO. Both of them are multiple years of development and cash burn away from their desired steady state in growth and feature terms. Nobody's raising the kind of capital today they'd need to compete with either one of them, let alone both of them *and* AWS, Azure and GCP all at the same time.

There will be an explosion of vendors running on those platforms or alongside them, but not competing with them. Not for a long time. Running cloud control planes and "serverless" infrastructure and building comprehensive data platform feature sets is just too expensive.

[Mellipop]

I pity the bit barn owners

True. Competing on price is a sure indication that a market is saturated. The product has become a commodity.

It's also incredibly wasteful of resources.

It is possible the "cambrian explosion" will not happen in data centres, but where the data is being generated; IoT.