We are excited to announce that Gartner has recognized Databricks as a Leader for a fourth consecutive year in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems. We are honored to be recognized as a leader among the 20 vendors evaluated. The solutions evaluated for this report included the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.
Download a complimentary copy of the report here.
In addition to being named a Leader, we’re thrilled to advance in both in Completeness of Vision and the Ability to Execute. The Ability to Execute score directly reflects our pace of innovation. In the past year, we have launched features in our Data Intelligence Platform for data warehousing, analytics and AI/BI, data sharing, data engineering, data governance, and lakehouse storage:
| Data Warehousing | Analytics and AI/BI | Data Sharing |
|---|---|---|
| AI functions | Dashboards | Collaborate without exposing sensitive raw data |
| 4x performance improvement without tuning | Dashboard cross-filtering and interactivity | Share AI models, volumes, views, materialized views, and streaming tables |
| AI-assisted SQL authoring | Dashboard sharing and embedding | Share data directly from where it is stored with Lakehouse Federation |
| Materialized views and streaming tables | Genie spaces | Private sharing |
| Leverage AI models directly via SQL | Genie benchmarks and Request a review | |
| SQL language enhancements | Publish to Power BI |
| Data Engineering | Data Governance | Lakehouse Storage |
|---|---|---|
| Native ingestion connectors for SaaS apps and databases | Unity Catalog open source | Databricks + Tabular |
| Simple data transformations and platform-wide orchestration | Unity Catalog metrics for business semantics | Open table format interoperability |
| Full observability with monitoring and alerting | Lakehouse Federation to external data sources | Iceberg REST Catalog API support |
| Row filtering/column masking | Autonomous table optimizations |
Democratizing Data + AI across your entire organization
Databricks pioneered the concept of the lakehouse to combine and unify the best of data warehouses and data lakes. Databricks made this vision a reality in 2020; since then, it has seen tremendous adoption as a category.
While lakehouse adoption has become a force in the market, our industry is innovating at an unprecedented rate. Businesses are insisting on governance to help them ensure that the right people are looking at the right data–and using it for the right purposes. With the rise of generative AI, we hear more companies insisting that this governance is extended to all of their data assets, including models and applications.
From ETL to data warehousing to generative AI, Databricks helps many of our customers worldwide simplify and accelerate their data and AI goals. We have over 10,000 global customers across all industries, building amazing solutions and delivering business impact with the lakehouse architecture.
“As data estates fragment and business units fund their own solutions, companies need to make it easier to keep their data portable by avoiding vendor lock-in and proprietary data formats. To address this challenge, Databricks has been doubling down on openness, including interoperability across formats and using open standards.” said Sanjeev Mohan, Principal Analyst at SanjMo and Former Gartner VP. “The way in which Databricks is approaching the entire data and AI stack through principles of openness, price/performance and end-to-end governance is well-aligned to what customers are looking for in a long-term strategic partner.”
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
We built the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to allow every employee in every organization to succeed with data and AI. Its foundation is a data lakehouse built on open table formats like Delta Lake. You own your data—it’s not locked into a vendor format or platform. Built on this platform, we can help you unify governance for all data and AI. Because your data estate is fragmented, we are committed to interoperability across the ecosystem to make it even easier to work with all your data, regardless of format.
The Data Intelligence Engine is infused throughout the platform to understand the semantics of your data and how it flows across all of your workloads. This technique allows for automated optimization, as well as for technical and non-technical users to use natural language to discover and use data and AI in the context of your business.
Governance, security, and regulatory compliance are critical to any data-driven organization because they help guarantee that all data assets are maintained and managed securely across the enterprise. Within our platform, Unity Catalog integrates the power of lakehouse and AI, enabling a comprehensive understanding of data while delivering contextual, domain-specific insights that boost productivity for both technical and business users. Unity Catalog supports seamless discovery, access, and sharing of trusted data and AI assets across any tool, compute engine, or cloud platform.
Data warehousing is not new, but infusing your data warehouse with AI-driven intelligence is. Customers want to spend less time managing the knobs and settings, and more time getting insights from their data. And they need to control costs, too. Databricks SQL is an intelligent, serverless data warehouse that runs all your SQL and BI applications at scale with continually improving performance, a unified governance model, open formats and APIs, and your tools of choice – no lock-in. After the inception of Databricks SQL in 2022, thousands of customers have migrated from legacy or cloud data warehouses to it. We continue to improve performance and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), too. Recently we delivered enhancements and AI optimizations that make your data workloads run 77% faster than in 2022.
As companies look to scale insights further across their workforce, we put a priority on delivering intelligent analytics for everyone. AI/BI is deeply integrated with Databricks SQL, and enables anyone to ask questions about their data in natural language and receive highly relevant and trusted AI-generated insights. Powered by data intelligence, AI/BI moves beyond traditional BI systems with bolt-on AI assistants by learning your entire data estate, usage patterns, and business semantics. This deep knowledge allows AI/BI to deliver accurate answers from complex, real-world data, democratizing analytics for everyone in your organization.
The fragmented data estate extends to complex data sharing across companies and clouds. An open approach to sharing and collaboration is critical to maximize reach and impact. Within our data intelligence platform, the Delta Sharing open protocol helps our customers easily and securely share data and AI assets to accelerate innovation. For collaboration with third-party data, the Databricks Marketplace is the open marketplace for all your data, analytics and AI needs.
What’s next
We believe our recognition as a Leader for a fourth consecutive year and our continued improvement in both Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute is a testament to Databricks’ success and our ability to unite data teams, all while helping them build the next generation of data and AI applications with quality, speed, and agility. We believe that data is even more essential to feeding the business, and AI is a force multiplier for this trend. Additionally, AI continues to help data platforms automatically optimize themselves (if done right). Thank you for your continued participation and trust on this journey.
Learn more
To learn more about the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, visit our website and check out our sessions and in-depth content at our Data+AI World Tour 2024. Also, follow us on LinkedIn for the latest news and updates.
You can also hear our CEO, Ali Ghodsi, outline our strategy in his Data and AI Summit keynote. Customers can also learn about upcoming innovations in our quarterly roadmap series.
Read the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems, Henry Cook, Ramke Ramakrishnan, Xingyu Gu, Aaron Rosenbaum, Masud Miraz, December 18, 2024.
