Background for a community post I wrote:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erikgfesser_gartner-databricks-database-activity-6925028958199570432-t5bW/
Gfesser: Success! About a week ago, I submitted the following comment on a "DBMS Market Share Ranks" post made by a VP at Gartner. After subsequently following up with db-engines, they have just informed me that, after careful consideration, my proposal to add Databricks to their monthly ranking has been approved, and it will be included starting in May 2022 (link to my original post in the comments below). In the meantime, Databricks has been added to their catalog of 391 database products (link to this catalog in the comments below).
New db-engines entry for Databricks:
https://db-engines.com/en/system/Databricks
My open letter to the folks at db-engines on April 20, 2022:
Gfesser:
I've been a heavy user of db-engines over the years, and continue to appreciate the information it provides.
I last contacted you in June 2017, and had some brief exchanges with Dr Paul Andlinger.
The other day, I visited db-engines for the first time in a while, and noticed that Databricks isn't yet represented in the rankings.
I'll greatly appreciate your explaining why this is the case, as well as your considering it being added.
The other day, I had a conversation on LinkedIn about the latest Gartner ranking on database vendors, and I noticed that Snowflake is present in both the Gartner and db-engines rankings, but Databricks is only present in the Gartner ranking.
I told the community that I would follow up with you on this.
In recent months, I've introduced use of Databricks SQL to a data platform for which I serve as chief architect. Storage and compute are separate, with compute provided by Databricks (Spark) clusters and storage provided by the data lake. SQL queries can be executed against any data for which Hive tables have been created.
Based on db-engines database categorizations, it looks like Databricks would fit in the "relational DBMS" category.
Other similar products I've used, such as Presto and Impala, are also represented in this category. You might also want to consider adding Amazon Athena to this category at the same time, which is built on Presto.
Also, I happened to notice in the "search engine" category that you've included "Microsoft Azure Search": the name of this product was actually changed to "Azure Cognitive Search" in 2019.
db-engines (Andlinger):
thank you for contacting us again!
We were struggling a little bit whether we should consider Databricks a DBMS and add it on DB-Engines, but yes, it’s there now. It will also appear in the DB-Engines Ranking from May onwards.
[omitted]
Gfesser:
VP Analyst at Gartner:
It's April... and that means it's time for a fresh bowl of DBMS spaghetti. This year's DBMS revenue rankings shows cloud continuing to surge as hyperscalers solidify their market position. As always, pure-play cloud vendors are in light blue.
Database Infrastructure Competitive Director at Oracle:
Do you identify which databases are included in the market share? For example Oracle is a lot more than just Oracle Database ie: MySQL and AWS has like 15 different database services where a majority are not AWS databases?
Gfesser: Right, Gartner typically ranks vendors, not products, although methodologies are always explained at the bottom of their reports (including the criteria that vendors need to meet to begin with in order to be considered as part of a given report). So these reports are a good start, but not a be-all-end-all way to understand a given market. For database products in particular, I've relied on db-engines to provide a low bias view of the database market, although I'm curiously seeing now that they currently include Snowflake but not Databricks, so I'll be reaching out to them. I last reached out to them a few years ago, and they've always provided me prompt and succinct responses.