Snowflake

Snowflake is Databricks' primary, absolutely massive rival, but it approaches Big Data from a fundamentally different philosophy. While Databricks grew out of the chaotic, open-source world of Data Science and Machine Learning, Snowflake grew out of the highly structured, enterprise world of Data Warehousing and SQL reporting. Its absolute stroke of genius was the "Separation of Storage and Compute." In legacy databases (like Oracle), if you bought a server, the processing power and the hard drive storage were physically locked together in the same metal box. Snowflake separated them in the cloud. A massive retailer can store petabytes of data in Snowflake for pennies (cheap storage). On Black Friday, they can instantly spin up 50 massive virtual CPUs (Compute) to run complex reports for exactly two hours, and then instantly spin them back down, only paying for the exact compute seconds they used. It is heavily favored by Data Analysts and Business Intelligence teams because it uses standard SQL. A company doesn't need to hire expensive Python developers; any analyst who knows basic SQL can log into Snowflake and instantly query petabytes of massive, semi-structured JSON data natively as if it were a simple Excel table.