Snowflake vs. Data Bricks: Compete To Create the Best Cloud Data Platform

In the world of business, a comparison of Snowflake and Data Bricks is important because it improves data analysis and business management. Organizations, companies, and businesses need a strategy to gather all the data in one place that is to be analyzed.

Cloud-based data systems Snowflake and Data Bricks are industry leaders. However, it is important to understand which data platform is the best for your company.

Both Snowflake and Data bricks provide the quantity, speed, and quality that business applications require, but there are some variations and some parallels.

The founder of Apache Spark founded the enterprise software Business Database. It is famous for using aspects of data lakes and data warehouses in a lake house architecture. Data warehouse business Snowflake provides cloud-based storage and gives services with less difficulty. It provides secure access to data and requires minimal maintenance.

 In this article, you will get a detailed comparison between Snowflake and Data Bricks. Here, you will get the benefits of each product so you can decide which one is the best for your company or business. Let’s start and take a look at their introduction:

What Is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a fully managed service that provides unlimited workloads for simple integration, loading, analysis, and sharing of data.

Data lakes, data engineering, data application development, data science and security, and the use of shared data are its typical uses.

Snowflake naturally separates computing and storage. With this architecture, you can give your user's data workload access to a copy of your data without any negative performance.

It enables you to run your data solutions across multiple locations and clouds.

It offers many options for interacting with many Snowflake users and also shares datasets and data services.

Features

Decision-Making Data-Driven

You can eliminate data storage and give everyone in the business access to useful insights with the help of Snowflakes. It is important to make partner relationships, optimize pricing, reduce costs, and increase sales.

Improving Speed and Quality of Analytics

You can strengthen your analytics pipeline with Snowflake by switching from nightly batch loads to real-time data streams. You can make your business secure control access to your data warehouse and improve the quality of analytics at work.

Improved Data Exchange

You can create your own data exchange with Snowflake. It allows for to secure transfer of live and regulated data. It develops strong data connections with partners, clients, and other businessmen. It allows you to take a full view of your customer and provides information about customer characteristics and interests, occupations, and other useful things.

Useful Products and User Experiences 

You can understand user behavior and products with Snowflake. You can use the entire dataset to satisfy customers, expand your product line, and drive data science.

Better Security

Compliance and cyber security data can be centralized in a secure data lake. Fast incident response is guaranteed by Snowflake Data Lakes. Aggregates large amounts of log data in one place and helps to get a complete picture of an incident quickly. It combines semi-structured logs and structured enterprise data into a single data lake. Through Snowflake, you can easily edit or change data after it is imported.

What Are Data Boxes?

Apache Spark powers Data Bricks, a cloud-based data platform. It focuses on big data analytics and collaborations.

You can provide a complete data science workspace for this. Business analysts, Data Scientists, and Data Engineers communicate using Data bricks’ machine, learning runtime, controlled ML flow, and collaborative notebooks.

Data Frames and Spark SQL libraries allow you to deal with structured data, which are stored in Data Bricks. In addition to creating Artificial intelligence, Data bricks help to draw conclusions from your existing data.

Data Bricks offers many libraries and machine learning, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and others, for building and training machine learning models.

Many business clients use Data Bricks to accomplish different production processes across many sectors like healthcare, media and entertainment, finance, retail, and more.

Features

Delta Lake

Data Bricks is a transactional storage layer that is open source and designed to be used for data lifecycle. This layer is used to provide data reliability to your existing data lake.

Interactive Notebooks

If you have the right language and tools, you can access your data quickly. You can easily analyze it and build models with others. You can share fresh and useful insights. Scala, R, SQL, and Python are just a few languages supported by Data Bricks.

Machine Learning

Data Bricks give you access to the pre-configured machine learning environment and provide access to Tensor Flow, Scikit-Learn, and Pytorch. You can share and monitor experiments, manage models, and replicate runs from a single central repository.

Improved Spark Engine

Data Bricks provides you latest versions of Apache Spark. If you get access to multiple cloud service providers, you can quickly set up clusters and build a managed Apache Spark environment. Clusters can be tuned with Data bricks. There is no need for constant monitoring and maintaining performance.

Difference Between Snowflake and Data Bricks

Architecture

Snowflake is an ANSI SQL-based serviceless system with completely separate storage and compute processing layers.

• In Snowflake, each virtual warehouse locally uses massively parallel processing (MPP) to execute queries.
• Snowflake uses micro partitions for internal data organization in a compressed columnar format that is stored in the cloud. Snowflakes maintains all aspects of data management, including file size, compression, structure, metadata, statistics, and other items that are not visible to users and only to SQL queries.
• Virtual warehouses, which are compute clusters consisting of many MPP nodes, are used to perform all processing within Snowflake.
• Both Snowflake and Data Bricks are SaaS solutions. However, Data Bricks has a very different architecture than those built on Spark.
• The multi-language engine called Spark can be deployed in the cloud and is based on single nodes or clusters. Data Bricks currently uses AWS, GCP, and Azure, as well as Snowflake.
• Its structure is made of a control plane and a data plane. All processed data resides in the data plane, while all back-end services managed by Data Bricks Serverless Computing reside in a control plane.
• Serverless computing enables administrators to create serverless SQL endpoints that are fully managed by Data bricks and offer instant computing.
• While computational resources for the majority of other Data bricks calculations are shared within a cloud account or traditional data plane, these resources are shared in a serverless data plane.

The architecture of Data bricks consists of several main parts:

• Data bricks Delta Lake
• Data Brick's Delta Engine
• ML Flow

Data Structure

We can save semi-structured and structured files by using Snowflake without the need for an ETL tool to sort data before importing it into EDW.

Snowflake immediately transforms the data into its structured form when it is collected. Unlike Data Lake, Snowflake doesn’t require you to structure your unstructured data before you can load and interact with it. You can also use Data Bricks as an ETL tool to structure your unstructured data so it can be used by other means like Snowflake.

In the debate between Data Bricks and Snowflake, Data Bricks dominates Snowflake in terms of data structure.

Ownership of Data 

Snowflake has separate processing and storage layers, which allows it to grow independently on the cloud. Snowflake secures access to data and machine resources using role-based access control (RBAC) techniques. Data Bricks’ data processing and storage layers are fully decoupled, unlike the decoupled layers in Snowflake. Users can put their data anywhere in any format, and Data Bricks will handle it efficiently because it is primarily a data application.

If we make a comparison between Data Bricks and Snowflake, we clearly see that Data Bricks is easy to use and process data.

Data Protection 

Time travel and failsafe are two unique features of Snowflake. Snowflake's time travel function keeps the data in a state before the update. While enterprise clients can choose a period of up to 90 days, time travel is often limited to one day. Databases, schemas, and tables can all use this capability. When the time travel retention period expires, a 7-day fail-safe period begins, designed to protect and restore previous data.

Data bricks work like Snowflake's time travel feature, also Delta Lakes. Data stored in Delta Lake is automatically versioned, allowing users to retrieve previous data versions for future use.

Data bricks run on Spark, and because Spark is built on object-level storage, Data bricks never store any data. This is one of its main advantages. It also shows that Data bricks can handle the use cases of on-premise systems.

Security

• Snowflake automatically controls all the data.
• All communication between the control plane and the data plane takes place within the cloud provider's private network, and all data stored within the data bricks is secured.
• Both options offer RBAC (Role-Based Access Control). Snowflake and Data Bricks adhere to multiple laws and certifications, including SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR. However, Data bricks operate on top of object-level storage such as AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, etc. Unlike Snowflake, it doesn't have a storage layer.

Performance

It is difficult to compare Snowflake and Data Bricks in terms of performance.

In the case of head-to-head comparison, Snowflake and Data Bricks support slightly different use cases and are not superior to others.

Snowflake may be a preferred option because it optimizes all storage for accessing data at the time of ingestion.

Use the Case

• BI and SQL use cases are well supported by Data Bricks and Snowflake.
• Snowflake provides JDBC and ODBC drivers that are easy to integrate with other software.
• Given that users do not need to manage the program, it is popular for its use cases in BI and businesses choosing a straightforward analytics platform.
• The open-source Delta Lake released by Data Bricks meanwhile adds an extra layer of stability to their data lake. Users can send SQL queries to Delta Lake with excellent performance.
• Given its variety and advanced technology, Data Bricks is known for its use cases that minimize vendor lock-in, are better suited for ML workloads, and support tech giants.

Result

The best data analysis tools include Snowflake and Data Bricks.

Each has advantages and disadvantages. Usage patterns, data volumes, workloads, and data strategy come into play when deciding which platform is ideal for your business.

Snowflake is best suited for people who have experience with SQL and for general data manipulation and analysis.

Streaming, ML, AI, and data science workloads are better suited to Data Bricks due to its Spark engine, which supports the use of multiple languages.

To catch up with other languages, Snowflake has introduced support for Python, Java, and Scala.

Some claim that Snowflake reduces storage during ingestion, so it's better for interactive queries. Additionally, it excels in generating reports and dashboards and managing BI workloads. In terms of data warehousing, it performs well.

However, some users have noted that it suffers from large amounts of data, similar to what is seen in streaming applications. Snowflake's victory in direct competition is based on data warehousing skills.

However, Data Bricks is not actually a data warehouse. Its data platform is more comprehensive and has superior ELT, data science, and machine learning capabilities than Snowflake.

Users do not control the cost of managed object storage where they store their data. Data leaks and data processing are important topics.

However, it is specifically targeted at data scientists and highly skilled analysts.

Finally, the success of Data bricks for a technical audience. Both tech-savvy and non-tech-savvy users can easily use Snowflake.

Almost all of the data management features offered by Snowflake are available through Data Bricks and more. But it's more difficult to do, involves a higher learning curve, and requires more maintenance.

However, it can handle a much larger range of data workloads and languages. And those familiar with Apache Spark will gravitate towards Data bricks.

Snowflake is ideal for users who want to quickly install a good data warehouse and analytics platform without getting bogged down in setup, data science details, or manual setup.

It also doesn't claim that Snowflake is a simple tool for new users. Absolutely not.

It is not as advanced as Data bricks. That platform is more suitable for complex data engineering, ETL, data science, and streaming applications.

Snowflake is a data warehouse for analytics that stores production data. Additionally, it is beneficial for individuals who want to start small and ramp up gradually, as well as for beginners.