Opinion
Borgman: Tabular acquisition gives Databricks marketing win, not open-source control
“I think probably the biggest thing that they get out of the acquisition is the ability to tell the market, That they can do iceberg two and not look like they had made a mistake with Dell with Delta. You know, that, that they can, they get sort of a marketing …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Justin Borgman: Apache Iceberg won the open table format war in 2024
“I feel like the summer of twenty-twenty-four, the world said, okay, it is Iceberg. And that was like VHS, Betamax, You know, decision made.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Borgman: Databricks will not control or kill Apache Iceberg
“Iceberg has, you know, is, is bigger than Databricks, honestly. And it will continue to be, I think, the ubiquitous format. You know, so if they had hopes of, like, killing it, I don't think that worked. If they had hopes of controlling it, I don't really thin…”
Insight
Justin Borgman: Open-source enterprise infrastructure beats proprietary alternatives over time
“I believe, gradually over time, enterprise software technology, at least infrastructure technology, wherever there are two things that are mostly the same, and one is open and one is not, the open is going to win over time.”
Assertion Supported
Borgman: Presto is mostly Facebook internal, while Trino is the mainstream branch
“They started as identical copies, but the code bases have diverged quite a bit. And today Presto is really just used by Facebook. So it's sort of like their own private branch in a way used by a small number of people. And Trino has become the mainstream commu…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Justin Borgman: Data lakehouses are the future of data architecture
“That performance gap is de minimis at this point, and that really has changed the game, and I think now lake houses are the future.”
Opinion
Justin Borgman: Teradata offers unique database capabilities no competitor can match
“It's an amazing database. I will still say that now, you know, seven years later, it's an amazing database. There are things that that, that system can do that, That really nobody else on the market can do. But, ah, it's proprietary and it's expensive.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Borgman: AI emergence may trigger cloud repatriation to on-premises
“There's you know, an interesting case to be made that there may be some repatriation with the AI emergence.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Borgman: On-prem vs. cloud dichotomy will persist indefinitely in enterprises
“I think this dichotomy is going to exist for as far as I can see.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Dell treats Starburst's OEM product as a fully comped first-party product
“It is a Dell product, you know, for all their sellers. It's a first-party product. They're getting comped in full. You know, it is treated as a Dell product in every way.”
Opinion
Borgman: Adopting popular database vendors with proprietary storage repeats vendor lock-in
“And I think that's a mistake that a lot of people are making today, is there's a very popular database company right now that I won't mention, that is very, very popular, has raised a lot of money, and once again, it is that that story of vendor lock-in all ov…”
Opinion
Borgman: Apache Spark is not built to support high concurrency workloads
“Anyone who's trying to do high concurrency will usually realize that Spark is not built for high concurrency.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Justin Borgman: Big data IT consulting will decline as software matures
“I think on the IT side, ah, I think there's a lot of opportunity for consulting right now because these technologies are so new and so complicated and so hard to use, but I think, ah, as time goes on, companies like HADAP, which are really trying to productize…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Justin Borgman: MongoDB is built for web applications, not data analytics
“MongoDB, for example, is purely complementary to what we do. You wouldn't use Mongo for analytics, really, and you wouldn't use us for, You know, keeping your webpage running, for example.”
Assertion Partly supported
Borgman: Facebook ran all data warehousing analytics on Presto
“It was really how Facebook was running all of their data warehousing analytics.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Borgman: Enterprises will never store all data in a single repository
“We do think data lakes are where you're going to want to store as much data as you can, just because the economics will drive that, but you'll never store everything”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Borgman: Databricks and Snowflake expand into adjacent markets to justify valuations
“You have a couple giant players in Databricks and Snowflake that are now looking for adjacent markets to continue to grow their TAM and justify their valuations and drive their revenue into the future. And, ah, and that's leading to more overlaps into boxes th…”
Assertion Partly supported
Borgman: Databricks and Snowflake operate strictly as cloud-only data platforms
“Databricks and Snowflake are cloud only, so if you happen to have data on-prem we're pretty much your only bet, and you know, it just so happens that that turns out to be most of the Fortune 500 almost the entirety of the financial Social services sector in pa…”
Insight
Borgman: Watching hyper-scale tech adopters predicts broader enterprise infrastructure trends
“You can watch those companies and kind of see where technology is probably going to go because they're the ones running at the most ridiculous scale. These technologies get really tested to the limit that way and can be a good indication of sort of where thing…”
Insight
Borgman: Open-source companies should monetize performance and security features
“Things around performance and security are very logical places to kind of draw some lines where you know that enterprise customers value that and you know, that's something that can be monetized.”
Disclosure
Starburst maintains the Apache license for Trino without adding restrictive licensing
“We don't, and that's something that at least philosophically my co-founders have been pretty, I guess, consistent on is a desire to continue to use the Apache license, which gives widespread flexibility and freedom to users of the technology, and so we haven't…”
Assertion Supported
Borgman: Dell is selling massive quantities of on-prem AI servers
“They're selling, selling a ton of servers right now, AI servers, which are basically, you know, have a lot of GPUs in them, a lot of NVIDIA products in there, and are seeing customers that are trying to get economies of scale by deploying that infrastructure o…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Borgman: Data architectures are shifting from batch ETL to Kafka streaming
“And that's an architecture I would say that we're seeing a lot of out there is Kafka as opposed to more traditional batch-oriented ETL.”
Insight
Borgman: Data mesh's lasting legacy is the concept of data products
“I think the lasting legacy, ah, of that, though, is this concept of data products, creating these sort of curated data sets from data that can live in, in multiple places, and thinking about them from a product perspective, with a product mindset, which is to …”
