Seems bad for Snowflake? Iceberg is a big part of Snowflake's data lake offering, and I assumed it was a Snowflake-originated OSS project until this announcement (all Snowflake products have snow related names).
Yesterday we announced Polaris specifically so (1) customers don't get locked into a catalog; (2) people know Snowflake works with AWS, Azure, Confluent, etc.
Iceberg is not Snowflake originated, it was built by folks at Netflix - the same folks who built Tabular.
But yes, this is definitely bad for Snowflake, Databricks can position itself as a very strong competitor with this move and moving more towards Iceberg.
So this makes it sound like a positive thing for Iceberg as a format. Others seem to be suggesting that DataBricks will be working to undermine the format in favor of their older Delta Lake format but that seems overly cynical.
My guess is Data Bricks saw the popularity of Iceberg and realized that they were starting to look a little irrelevant still trying to promote their competing Delta Lake format. Have an Iceberg lakehouse? Well then Databricks just didn't seem very relevant to you. With their purchase of Tabular they're given some legitimacy when they start marketing their products as being iceberg compatible. This doesn't signal to me that Iceberg is going to be harmed in the near or medium term.
