Snowflake and Databricks buy PostgreSQL know how

In the past few weeks in May and June 2025 Snowflake and Databricks with their acquisions of Neon and Crunchy Data followed Microsoft with their acquisition of Citus Data in 2019.

Immediately after that on their Data+AI Summit Databricks launched the Lakebase transactional database service which was developed by Neom and is based on the PostgreSQL open source DBMS technology and stores all of the data on cloud blob storage:

Taking into account the above videos of the product announcement of Lakebase we can now add a new column to the table from How DuckLake compares to Databricks, IceBerg, BigQuery and Snowflake?

Data architectural layers	Lakebase	Databricks	Iceberg	DuckLake	BigQuery	Snowflake
Main purpose	transactional	analytic	file format	in process database	analytical	analytical
Catalog	Neom PostgreSQL service	Unity Catatog in Databricks, Hive catalog in DeltaLake	Iceberg Catalog	Schema in SQL Database for both catalog and table metadata	Spanner	FoundationDB
Metadata layer	Metadata files in open source formats like DeltaLake	DeltaLake Metadata files	Iceberg metadata files (manifest list, manifest files)	Schema in SQL Database for both catalog and table metadata	Spanner	FoundationDB
Data layer	Data files in open source formats (Parquet etc.)	Data files (Parquet etc.)	Data files (Parquet etc.)	Data files (Parquet etc.)	Data files	Data files

All of the above offerings store data within the very cheap basic blob storage in the respective public cloud services and with the except of Iceberg and DuckLake, which define metadata management, all of the services allow for flexible scalability of the compute needed for all tasks and queries.

But, when DuckLake, BigQuery and Snowflake have chosen to use database technology to manage schema and table metadata, all metadata within Lakebase, Databricks and Iceberg is also managed in files within the basic cloud storage layer.

It will be seen, if the option to "branch" a database like it is used within GIT for source code will be the unique selling point (USP) and a killer feature for this product,
and it will be seen, what Snowflake can make out of their acquisition...

...but the fact is, it is a sexy offering to move all of your transactional and analytics workflows into one place and make profit from the serverless services, seamlessly scalable compute and basically infinite and cheap cloud storage.

P.S. Beware, cloud was usually or in average 20 to 25% percent more expensive than on premises, but may be "pay as you" go will be your way ;)

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