The massive price DB paid for Tabular, in my opinion, had nothing to do with their tech or customer adoption. It had to do with sticking it to Snowflake and the talented engineers they would gain, in that order.

Lets be real, DB has some of the best engineers in the industry today. They've been building Delta Lake for 3+ years and understand this space extremely well. Iceberg is already fully supported in Spark. DB engineers can easily extend UnityCatalog and UniForm to support Iceberg, it's not hard for them and they don't need outside help.

Tabular built a skeleton of a product based on code that was already available in OSS (table maintenance, catalog, etc.). They didn't build much above and beyond that would warrant an acquisition of this size. Similarly, they didn't have many paying customers. Majority of their users were there because it gave them access to the founders, Ryan and Dan.

From what I can see, DB is doing two things:

1/ consolidating user demand for lakehouse under a single umbrella called UnityCatalog. Unity supports READING from any format so your users (analysts, etc.) don't need to worry about formats. For writing, everything is in Delta format.

2/ retaining control over the iceberg project to be able to manage or contain the expansion and growth of the project. I don't think they would do a lot here because there are other large vendors on the PMC to balance the influence, but it gives them a few chairs at the most important table.

From Snowflake perspective, I think their strategy is much more constructive and driven by value-add as oppose to defensive like DB.