Databricks acquires Tabular to build a common data lakehouse standard

Comment
Databricks, the analytics and AI giant, has acquired data management company Tabular for an undisclosed sum. (CNBC reports that Databricks paid over $1 billion.)
According to Tabular co-founder Ryan Blue, he and Tabular’s other two co-founders, Daniel Weeks and Jason Reid, will be joining Databricks in some capacity. There, they’ll work to unify Tabular’s and Databrick’s customer bases and communities.
“Joining Databricks means that there will be more contributions from our new colleagues,” Blue writes in a blog post. “While doing this, we assure that our approach to [our community] is not changing.”
Tabular, which was founded by Blue, Weeks and Reid in 2021, offers data management products built on Apache Iceberg, a project Blue and Weeks developed while at Netflix and later donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Iceberg is an open source, high-performance format for databases that optimizes tables in databases for big data while at the same time allowing data engines to work with the tables.
Iceberg competed with Databricks’ Delta Lake in the format wars for data lakehouses — data architectures built to store large amounts of raw data while providing structure and management functions. While both Iceberg and Delta Lake use the Apache Parquet data storage format, they’re incompatible in key aspects.
Soon, however, Delta Lake and Iceberg will converge into one. Databricks and Tabular are pledging to work toward a common standard in light of the acquisition news.
“[We will be] working to improve Iceberg support throughout the Databricks platform,” Blue said. “Our goal is to improve interoperability so that you can take advantage of the amazing work of both communities and don’t need to worry about the underlying format.”
The market for data lakehouses is enormous — according to MIT Tech Review, about 74% of organizations have one — and so, from Databricks’ perspective, bringing Tabular into its corporate family was probably the clear choice. Fewer competing data lakehouse formats — or, alternatively, platforms with strong support for multiple formats — makes Databricks’ platform more attractive to corporate clients, after all, even if those formats aren’t vendor-proprietary.
In a blog post co-authored by Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi and chief architect Reynold Xin, Databricks says that it intends to “work closely” with the Iceberg and Delta Lake communities to “bring interoperability to the formats themselves.”
“This acquisition highlights our commitment to open formats and open source data in the cloud,” the blog post reads. “This is a long journey, one that will likely take several years to achieve in [the data lakehouse] communities.”
Prior to the acquisition, San Jose-based Tabular had raised $37 million in venture capital from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Zetta Venture Partners and Altimeter Capital. Databricks says that it expects the purchase to close sometime in Q2 2024, subject to customary closing conditions.
Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage.
Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly.
The latest Fintech news and analysis, delivered every Tuesday.
TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has emerged victorious in India’s 2024 general election, but with a smaller majority compared to 2019. According to post-election analysis by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan,…
Featured Article
The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the…
Featured Article
Apple is hoping to make WWDC 2024 memorable as it finally spells out its generative AI plans.
We just announced the breakout session winners last week. Now meet the roundtable sessions that really “rounded” out the competition for this year’s Disrupt 2024 audience choice program. With five…
The malicious attack appears to have involved malware transmitted through TikTok’s DMs.
It’s unusual for three major AI providers to all be down at the same time, which could signal a broader infrastructure issues or internet-scale problem.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at LoanSnap’s woes, Nubank’s and Monzo’s positive milestones, a plethora of fintech fundraises and more! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest…
Databricks, the analytics and AI giant, has acquired data management company Tabular for an undisclosed sum. (CNBC reports that Databricks paid over $1 billion.) According to Tabular co-founder Ryan Blue,…
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved…
The next few weeks could be pivotal for Worldcoin, the controversial eyeball-scanning crypto venture co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whose operations remain almost entirely shuttered in the European Union following…
OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT has been down for several users across the globe for the last few hours.
True Fit, the AI-powered size-and-fit personalization tool, has offered its size recommendation solution to thousands of retailers for nearly 20 years. Now, the company is venturing into the generative AI…
Audio streaming service TuneIn is teaming up with Discord to bring free live radio to the platform. This is TuneIn’s first collaboration with a social platform and one that is…
The early victors in the AI gold rush are selling the picks and shovels needed to develop and apply artificial intelligence. Just take a look at data-labeling startup Scale AI…
Try to imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting approvals to purchase the…
Raspberry Pi has released a $70 AI extension kit with a neural network inference accelerator that can be used for local inferencing, for the Raspberry Pi 5.
When Stacklet’s founders, Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu, came out of Capital One in 2020 to launch their startup, most companies weren’t all that concerned with constraining cloud costs. But…
Fivetran’s Managed Data Lake Service aims to remove the repetitive work of managing data lakes.
Lance Riedel and Nigel Daley both spent decades in search discovery, but it was while working at Pinterest that they began trying to understand how to use search engines to…
GetWhy helps businesses carry out market studies and extract insights from video-based interviews using AI.
AI-powered virtual physical therapy platform Sword Health has seen its valuation soar 50% to $3 billion.
Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa, along with three general partners, manage $1.5 billion in assets today through their Build, Venture and Seed strategies.
The startup targets the middle ground between platforms that offer rigid templates, and those that facilitate a full-control approach.
The startup has been pursuing a ground-up redesign of a well-understood technology.
Sēkr, a startup that offers a mobile app for outdoor enthusiasts and campers, is launching a new AI tool for planning road trips. The new tool, called Copilot, is available…
Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union. Privacy rights nonprofit noyb has just lodged two complaints with Austria’s data…
Since the shock of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, solar energy has been having a moment in Europe. Electricity prices have been going up while the investment required to get…
Featured Article
It’s clear that this year will be a turning point for DEI.
The keynote will be focused on Apple’s software offerings and the developers that power them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS.
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. Unfortunately, Boeing’s Starliner launch was delayed yet again, this time due to issues with one of the three redundant computers used by United…
Powered by WordPress VIP

source
Sponsor:News technical sponsor
Sponsor:News AI sponsor
Sponsor: AI sponsor
Sponsor: AI sponsor