In the summer of 2023 we visited the Data & AI Summit organized by Databricks in San Francisco.

We already use Databricks for some clients, but we were impressed by the focus Databricks has on supporting the developer community in developing, hosting, and maintaining complex Data & AI solutions.

At the same time, Microsoft’s marketing machine around Fabric started to pick up speed. Customers started to ask questions, and also from our own MCPS team, there were questions about what Fabric will mean for us. How does it relate to Synapse, but also how does it relate to Databricks?

Because we are already building our current data platform based on Synapse, in this session, we mainly want to address the question: if you want to build a new data platform now and you can choose between Databricks and Fabric, what is the best choice?

We will answer this question by first addressing the following questions:

What are the characteristics of Databricks and Fabric? What are the strengths and weaknesses of Databricks and Fabric? What do you need to build a data platform?

Target audience: everyone who is interested in tools for modern data platforms