:) That is a good question. Why spend eng cycles to submit results to the TPC council - why not just focus on customers?

I believe the co-founders have addressed this in the blog.

> Our goal was to dispel the myth that Data Lakehouse cannot have best-in-class price and performance. Rather than making our own benchmarks, we sought the truth and participated in the official TPC benchmark.

I'm sure anybody seriously looking at evaluating data platforms would want to look at things holistically. There are different dimensions like open ecosystem, support for machine learning, performance etc. And different teams evaluating these platforms would stack rank them in different orders.

These blogs, I believe, show that Databricks is a viable choice for customers when performance is a top priority (along with other dimensions). That IMO is customer obsession.

I'd say helping customers spot fraud* is serving the customers' interests.

* I haven't executed the test suite, but fraud seems likely.

All publicity is good publicity.

Both participants in a fight can win by implicitly excluding their real competitors.

Yes, the tone of those blogposts, the likelihood of fake benchmarks submitted on someone else's behalf and especially the deluge of new accounts supporting them makes me want to trust Databricks even less than the PoC my company ran with them last year and spending time with their terrible, terrible salespeople.

EDIT: I forgot lying about how open they are when all their interesting technologies (like the new sql engine and the good parts of delta) are proprietary.

What fake benchmarks are you talking about?

I think Snowflake cultivates a very careful public image, but in private their sales people use.. how do you say.. aggressive techniques.. databricks is addressing the source of market confusion head-on