Databricks

Raised as a usability problem by 11 people on Hacker News over 7 years (2020–2026), in 8 threads.

People raised many different problems with Databricks, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 11 complaints

Generated queries are often wrong or nearly right, forcing manual decipher-and-fix work2026-07-29
Hard to get even decent logs out of the product2025-08-21
Maintenance broke feature; reconfiguring from scratch failed and nothing could be fixed on their end2025-08-20
Can't set Spark config; workaround took lots of documentation hunting2025-05-17
Proprietary notebook format subtly incompatible with Jupyter notebooks2025-05-15
Editor is flaky, browser-only, with limited unfamiliar keyboard shortcuts2025-05-06
Clusters take five minutes to load even for trivial code2024-03-27
Notebook slows down and uses lots of memory with modest cell counts2023-04-12
Debugging it is very frustrating for the person doing it2021-02-02
Can't browse table structure without a running cluster; long startup delays before querying2021-02-01
Product felt unreliable and frustrating to use for shuffle-heavy Spark workloads2020-05-11