Is it about semantic modeling of your data; as reviews suggest? It is 5yr old book, nowadays data semantics is already quite established approach I believe, with new tech like DBT semantic models, knowledge graphs in data.world etc?

If I think their roots: one is like Oracle DB, another is Notebooks on steroids, then they dont even seem to overlap much. But Databricks has own nice native big data storage (snowflake-grade) and snowflake has added quite nice processing/notebook-like features (eg snowspark), so both try to be wider and universial platforms, not just tools. Eventually data scientists will understand databricks more and your former Oracle DBAs will take snowflake more seriously. They both are solid, well established and still actively growing things, with active ecosystem etc. Now there is also third similar scale platform, even more actively marketed, technically interesting due to wide integration to MS data world, even if newer and less proven/mature yet - MS Fabric, in the Azure universe. I’m currently in sales pipeline in all 3 of them and as part of major “enterprise of enterprises” they all push quite hard to prove that theira is best. Our company already uses snowflake and databricks in other divisions and so far it seems that they are happy with both options.