[drawturkey]

So if I stop paying Databricks, I can no longer use their proprietary query engine (Photon), right? I have to use something else, like Open Source Spark SQL which is slower and will cost a lot more money.

There are different ways to lock customers in and both Databricks and Snowflake are playing the game.

[blueglassfish]

I’m not sure this locks anyone in. The APIs are open and Spark code will run on, say EMR, just fine.

Every vendor, be it Snowflake, Databricks, EMR, Athena, BQ, … charges for use of the engine. The difference with a Lakehouse is that one doesn’t have to pay the vendor for the simple ability to use the data with another offering. That’s what you have to pay for with closed systems, whether it’s data on the way in or data on the way out.