Tools11 min read
Snowflake vs Databricks in 2026: Pick the Workload, Not the Logo
An honest head-to-head: SQL warehousing vs Spark lakehouse, Iceberg interoperability, Cortex vs Mosaic, and when you actually need both.
- snowflake
- databricks
- tools
Topic
#databricks
7 posts ·view all posts
Tools
Databricks10 min read
Delta Lake vs Apache Iceberg: Default on Databricks vs Shared Lake
Table-format choice in 2026: deletion vectors, catalogs, and which engine you are willing to lock in.
- databricks
- snowflake
- tools
Databricks9 min read
Databricks and Delta Lake: A Practical Introduction to the Lakehouse
What the lakehouse actually is, how Delta Lake adds ACID transactions to cheap object storage, and the medallion architecture in practice.
- databricks
- delta-lake
- spark
Databricks10 min read
Declarative Pipelines in Databricks: Expectations, Streaming Tables, and When the Abstraction Fights You
What DLT genuinely buys you, how expectations and streaming tables behave in production, and the four situations where I still write plain Spark jobs instead.
- databricks
- pipelines
Databricks11 min read
Cutting a Databricks Bill: Job Clusters, Spot, Photon, and Finding the Top Offenders in System Tables
How I take 30 percent off a Databricks bill in a week: kill all-purpose clusters for jobs, price spot properly, test Photon per workload, and rank spend with system.billing.
- databricks
- cost
Databricks8 min read
Unity Catalog in Practice: Metastore Layout, Grants That Scale, and Leaving hive_metastore
How I structure Unity Catalog for real teams: three-level namespace design, group-based grants, lineage that works, and a hive_metastore migration that ships.
- databricks
- governance
Databricks9 min read
Delta Lake Internals: The Transaction Log, Checkpoints, and Why Small Files Happen
How the _delta_log actually works: JSON commits, optimistic concurrency, checkpoints, deletion vectors, and the small-file problem nobody escapes.
- databricks
- delta-lake