Justin Borgman, CEO and co-founder of Starburst, details his foundational investment thesis on open source versus proprietary software in enterprise data infrastructure.
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…”
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.”