Why Speed and Efficiency Are the Natural Outcome of an Enterprise Ready Platform: A Comparison of Cost and Performance of Snowflake and Databricks
By: James Dinkel
In enterprise data platforms, performance problems rarely show up as slow queries.
They show up as missed SLAs, unpredictable costs, operational overhead, and risk at scale. Speed and cost matter — but for enterprises, they are not the objective. Enterprise readiness is.
Platforms architected from the ground up for enterprise requirements — security, governance, reliability, interoperability, and operational simplicity — deliver predictable performance and lower cost as a natural outcome. Platforms that are not require constant tuning, oversizing, and intervention just to stay within acceptable bounds.
This architectural difference explains a consistent pattern we see across customer evaluations and standardized benchmarks: Snowflake delivers faster performance at lower cost than Databricks — not through tuning or resource inflation, but through enterprise-ready design.
Purpose-Built for Performance vs. Performance by Adding Resources
Snowflake and Databricks were built with fundamentally different design goals. Snowflake was architected from the start to support:
- A highly optimized planner and execution engine
- Automatic concurrency and workload management
- A fully managed, serverless operating model
- Built-in security and governance
Databricks evolved from Apache Spark, originally designed for batch processing and data engineering. While used for engineering-centric use cases, performance remains closely tied to:
- Cluster sizing and auto-scaling behavior
- Runtime configuration
- DBU consumption
Databricks has invested in improving these areas (e.g., Serverless SQL, Photon); however, the availability and strength of these capabilities are inconsistent across its platform.
The result: performance in Snowflake is predictable and automatic, whereas in Databricks it is conditional and, in many cases, operationally intensive.
Enterprises Run Mixed, Concurrent Workloads
Real enterprise environments don’t optimize for one query or one user. They run mixed workloads simultaneously,
- Short, high-concurrency BI queries
- Medium analytical exploration
- Large, complex joins and aggregations
- Data pipelines, ML training, AI-powered queries
In customer evaluations, enterprises frequently replay real “busy hour” production workloads on both platforms. Across these mixed workloads and standardized TPC-DS tests, the outcome is consistent: Snowflake performs faster across workload types, with lower total cost and far less variance.
Same Size on Paper. Different Compute. Different Results.
Enterprise teams often assume that similarly named tiers deliver similar performance. In practice, that assumption doesn’t hold.
Across customer evaluations and standardized benchmarks, platforms with the same nominal tier size can deliver meaningfully different compute capacity, leading to different performance and cost outcomes.
At comparable “X-Large” tiers, results consistently show:
- Large queries (>10 seconds): Snowflake is ~1.7x faster and ~1.5x lower cost per query
- Small queries (<10 seconds):Snowflake is ~1.4x faster and ~1.2x lower cost
- Across all queries: Snowflake is ~1.5x faster overall and ~1.3x lower total cost
Why is it important for enterprises?
Enterprise performance challenges rarely arise from a single query—they arise from concurrency, complexity, and scale occurring simultaneously. And a platform that is performant and cost-effective under different scenarios ensures a customer’s deployment is future-proof.
When Similar Sizes Deliver Different Outcomes
To isolate platform efficiency, both platforms were tested using comparable compute tiers (Snowflake Gen2 XXL and Databricks SQL Serverless XL) on a 10TB TPC-DS workload.
Despite similar underlying infrastructure:
- Snowflake completed workloads 1.8x to 2.15x faster
- Performance variance was minimal
- Total cost was lower — even when Snowflake’s hourly rate was higher
Warm power run results:
Comparable Compute | Databricks XL | Snowflake Gen2 XXL |
Warm Power Run Duration | 915 – 1,150 seconds | 509 – 534 seconds |
Warehouse Hourly Rate (SE) | $56.00 | $86.40 |
Cost of Run (Standard Edition) | $17.89 | $12.82 |
For enterprises, this translates directly into:
- Easier SLA compliance
- Lower resource consumption resulting in lower costs
More predictable operations at scale
Matching SLAs Reveals Platform Efficiency
Enterprises don’t buy platforms to win benchmarks — they buy them to meet SLAs consistently.
When Databricks is scaled up to match Snowflake’s performance, the performance gap narrows — but the cost gap widens dramatically. Achieving equivalent performance for Databricks requires significantly more compute, driving materially higher costs. Snowflake, by contrast, meets the same SLAs with fewer resources and costs remain 2x lower under Standard Edition (SE) pricing and 1.5x under Enterprise Edition (EE) pricing.
Warm power run results:
Performance Matching | Databricks XXXL | Snowflake Gen2 XXL |
Warm Power Run Duration | 522 seconds | 518 seconds |
Cost of Run (SE): | $27.60 | $12.43 |
This highlights a core enterprise principle: efficiency matters more than flexibility at scale.
Enterprise Readiness Is the Differentiator
Performance and cost are not the definition of enterprise readiness — they are the result of it. Snowflake’s architecture includes:
- A fully managed, serverless platform, built-in security, governance, and cyber defense with cross-cloud DR and data sharing – https://squadrondata.com/enterprise-ready/)
- Interoperability across open table formats, catalogs, and semantic layers – https://squadrondata.com/openness/
- Automatic performance optimization and cost governance
As enterprise usage grows, these capabilities help reduce operational risk, simplify management, and support predictable outcomes—without constant tuning or oversight. Across customer evaluations and standardized benchmarks, Snowflake consistently delivers strong performance at lower total cost—not because of tuning techniques or oversized clusters, but because enterprise readiness is built into the architecture.
All performance and cost comparisons in this article are based on specific customer evaluations and benchmark tests conducted under defined configurations and assumptions, including TPC-DS workloads. Results may vary based on workload characteristics, data volumes, configuration choices, pricing agreements, and cloud environments. The findings reflect our professional analysis and experience and are not intended to represent universal performance outcomes. If you would like to discuss your situation, please feel free to reach out to us at info@squadrondata.com
Appendix
TPS-DS results for XL / XL Run
The individual query IDs (Q_01–Q_99) shown below correspond to standard TPC-DS query templates and variants. While the semantics of each query differ, they collectively represent a realistic mix of joins, aggregations, filters, and data access patterns typical of enterprise analytical workloads.
Rather than focusing on a single query, this appendix aims to demonstrate the distribution and consistency of performance and cost outcomes across the full workload. The aggregated results in the article above summarize these patterns. Furthermore, we have grouped the queries into large (>10 seconds) and small (<10 seconds) and have notated the price per query for both platforms using standard pricing for each platform as follows:
Snowflake: XL Gen2, 21.6 Hourly Credits, $3/credit = $64.80/hr
Databricks: Serverless SQL XL, 80 DBU/hr, $.70/DBU = $56.00/hr
Detail:
QUERY | Big/Small | Snowflake Duration Milliseconds | Snowflake Cost | Databricks Duration Milliseconds | Databricks Duration Cost |
Q_01 | small | 1907 | $34.33 | 4930 | $70.12 |
Q_02 | small | 5576 | $100.37 | 5942 | $92.43 |
Q_03 | small | 1541 | $27.74 | 1671 | $25.99 |
Q_04 | big | 36988 | $665.78 | 56455 | $878.19 |
Q_05 | big | 4959 | $89.26 | 12685 | $197.32 |
Q_06 | small | 1478 | $26.60 | 1736 | $27.00 |
Q_07 | small | 4555 | $81.99 | 8553 | $133.05 |
Q_08 | small | 1611 | $29.00 | 2376 | $36.96 |
Q_09 | big | 23421 | $421.58 | 13211 | $205.50 |
Q_10 | small | 2842 | $51.16 | 2838 | $44.15 |
Q_11 | big | 19986 | $359.75 | 21649 | $336.76 |
Q_12 | small | 921 | $16.58 | 1211 | $18.84 |
Q_13 | small | 5934 | $106.81 | 5574 | $86.71 |
Q_14P1 | big | 28700 | $516.60 | 22587 | $351.35 |
Q_14P2 | big | 25937 | $466.87 | 18275 | $284.28 |
Q_15 | small | 2271 | $40.88 | 2411 | $37.50 |
Q_16 | small | 2458 | $44.24 | 4648 | $72.30 |
Q_17 | big | 6123 | $110.21 | 24762 | $385.19 |
Q_18 | small | 4458 | $80.24 | 5084 | $79.08 |
Q_19 | small | 1601 | $28.82 | 2424 | $37.71 |
Q_20 | small | 722 | $13.00 | 1264 | $19.66 |
Q_21 | small | 832 | $14.98 | 1573 | $24.47 |
Q_22 | small | 1036 | $18.65 | 1721 | $26.77 |
Q_23P1 | big | 33679 | $606.22 | 45265 | $704.12 |
Q_23P2 | big | 33285 | $599.13 | 36046 | $560.72 |
Q_24P1 | big | 16244 | $292.39 | 41193 | $640.78 |
Q_24P2 | big | 15342 | $276.16 | 20525 | $319.28 |
Q_25 | small | 3455 | $62.19 | 4738 | $73.70 |
Q_26 | small | 2622 | $47.20 | 3338 | $51.92 |
Q_27 | small | 4179 | $75.22 | 5262 | $81.85 |
Q_28 | big | 28852 | $519.34 | 32901 | $511.79 |
Q_29 | big | 8780 | $158.04 | 10622 | $165.23 |
Q_30 | small | 1549 | $27.88 | 3137 | $48.80 |
Q_31 | big | 6323 | $113.81 | 21350 | $332.11 |
Q_32 | small | 1320 | $23.76 | 1244 | $19.35 |
Q_33 | small | 3299 | $59.38 | 3613 | $56.20 |
Q_34 | small | 2878 | $51.80 | 4233 | $65.85 |
Q_35 | small | 6340 | $114.12 | 5188 | $80.70 |
Q_36 | small | 5122 | $92.20 | 8124 | $126.37 |
Q_37 | small | 2570 | $46.26 | 2022 | $31.45 |
Q_38 | big | 9525 | $171.45 | 11626 | $180.85 |
Q_39P1 | small | 1272 | $22.90 | 2776 | $43.18 |
Q_39P2 | small | 1100 | $19.80 | 5209 | $81.03 |
Q_40 | small | 3614 | $65.05 | 4249 | $66.10 |
Q_41 | small | 210 | $3.78 | 538 | $8.37 |
Q_42 | small | 852 | $15.34 | 1033 | $16.07 |
Q_43 | small | 3066 | $55.19 | 3338 | $51.92 |
Q_44 | big | 9923 | $178.61 | 16228 | $252.44 |
Q_45 | small | 2714 | $48.85 | 3058 | $47.57 |
Q_46 | small | 5921 | $106.58 | 4320 | $67.20 |
Q_47 | big | 24918 | $448.52 | 13957 | $217.11 |
Q_48 | small | 5994 | $107.89 | 3815 | $59.34 |
Q_49 | small | 7689 | $138.40 | 5428 | $84.44 |
Q_50 | big | 13639 | $245.50 | 16642 | $258.88 |
Q_51 | big | 11111 | $200.00 | 6293 | $97.89 |
Q_52 | small | 710 | $12.78 | 1278 | $19.88 |
Q_53 | small | 2233 | $40.19 | 2543 | $39.56 |
Q_54 | small | 2147 | $38.65 | 2420 | $37.64 |
Q_55 | small | 811 | $14.60 | 960 | $14.93 |
Q_56 | small | 2772 | $49.90 | 3751 | $58.35 |
Q_57 | small | 7886 | $141.95 | 8418 | $130.95 |
Q_58 | small | 1749 | $31.48 | 1710 | $26.60 |
Q_59 | small | 4443 | $79.97 | 9340 | $145.29 |
Q_60 | small | 3042 | $54.76 | 4700 | $73.11 |
Q_61 | small | 2874 | $51.73 | 3899 | $60.65 |
Q_62 | small | 3114 | $56.05 | 3374 | $52.48 |
Q_63 | small | 2480 | $44.64 | 2867 | $44.60 |
Q_64 | big | 27077 | $487.39 | 29278 | $455.44 |
Q_65 | big | 9016 | $162.29 | 17368 | $270.17 |
Q_66 | big | 4921 | $88.58 | 21056 | $327.54 |
Q_67 | big | 26810 | $482.58 | 61871 | $962.44 |
Q_68 | small | 2225 | $40.05 | 3347 | $52.06 |
Q_69 | small | 3076 | $55.37 | 2893 | $45.00 |
Q_70 | small | 4173 | $75.11 | 8066 | $125.47 |
Q_71 | small | 2482 | $44.68 | 4408 | $68.57 |
Q_72 | small | 8067 | $145.21 | 9780 | $152.13 |
Q_73 | small | 1229 | $22.12 | 1662 | $25.85 |
Q_74 | big | 14666 | $263.99 | 14855 | $231.08 |
Q_75 | big | 31029 | $558.52 | 45041 | $700.64 |
Q_76 | big | 15469 | $278.44 | 14932 | $232.28 |
Q_77 | small | 2242 | $40.36 | 2374 | $36.93 |
Q_78 | big | 137355 | $2,472.39 | 61750 | $960.56 |
Q_79 | small | 4309 | $77.56 | 3690 | $57.40 |
Q_80 | big | 11246 | $202.43 | 15181 | $236.15 |
Q_81 | big | 2671 | $48.08 | 11723 | $182.36 |
Q_82 | small | 3535 | $63.63 | 7474 | $116.26 |
Q_83 | small | 1216 | $21.89 | 1838 | $28.59 |
Q_84 | small | 1262 | $22.72 | 2572 | $40.01 |
Q_85 | small | 4408 | $79.34 | 3884 | $60.42 |
Q_86 | small | 2674 | $48.13 | 4942 | $76.88 |
Q_87 | big | 12528 | $225.50 | 9446 | $146.94 |
Q_88 | big | 10652 | $191.74 | 42824 | $666.15 |
Q_89 | small | 4626 | $83.27 | 4204 | $65.40 |
Q_90 | small | 3832 | $68.98 | 3435 | $53.43 |
Q_91 | small | 1130 | $20.34 | 2043 | $31.78 |
Q_92 | small | 845 | $15.21 | 1349 | $20.98 |
Q_93 | small | 343 | $6.17 | 385 | $5.99 |
Q_94 | big | 3479 | $62.62 | 13908 | $216.35 |
Q_95 | small | 5394 | $97.09 | 5370 | $83.53 |
Q_96 | small | 7280 | $131.04 | 5848 | $90.97 |
Q_97 | big | 26874 | $483.73 | 26264 | $408.55 |
Q_98 | small | 1383 | $24.89 | 2105 | $32.74 |
Q_99 | small | 5299 | $95.38 | 5558 | $86.46 |
