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Databricks acquires Neon

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Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#41

Post by bradhe »

acd10j wrote: post #20

Databricks is Oracle-level bad. They will definitely ruin Neon or make it expensive. In the medium to long term, I will start looking for Neon alternatives.

Definitely agree, their M&A strategy is setup to strangle whoever they buy and they don't even know it. They're struggling in the face of Iceberg, DuckDB and the other tectonic shifts happening in the open source world. They are trying to innovate through acquisition, but can't quite make it because their culture kills the companies they buy.

I'm biased, I'm a big-data-tech refugee (ex-Snowflake) and am working on https://tower.dev right now, but we're definitely seeing the open source trend supported by Iceberg. It'll be really interesting to see how this plays out.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#42

Post by Hawxy »

tudorg wrote: post #10
Squarex wrote: post #6

I’ve loved Neon and now I’m a little worried. Are there any alternatives?

[Disclaimer: I work for Xata] As it happens, we've just launched our new Xata platform ( https://xata.io/ ) which has some of the key Neon features: instant copy-on-write branching and separation of storage and compute. As an extra twist, we also can do anonymization (PII masking) between your production database and developer branches. The way we do copy-on-write branches is a bit different. We haven't done any modi…

The PII masking aspect is very interesting and something we couldn't get when we decided on DBLab a month ago. What does the deployment model within AWS look like?

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#45

Post by Robdel12 »

I applied to neon last week and then the news broke about the acquisition. They rejected it this morning — I have never been happier to receive a rejection to an application.

This would’ve been three acquisitions straight for me and… I’m okay, they’re awful. I just want stability.

Congrats to the neon team! I use and love neon. Really hope this doesn’t change them too much.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#46

Post by spooky_action »

presentation wrote: post #4

Guess this is the beginning of the end of a great service, not holding my breath. Sounds like from the WSJ article that they’ll just become some AI agent backend service for Replit, and from the previous conversation on HN that Databricks ruins and shutters their acquisitions. Congrats on the big payout for the employees, though.

What's the relationship to replit?

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#48

Post by davidgomes »

anentropic wrote: post #47

How do they know 80% of Neon databases are created by AI agents?

We can see which database creations are coming from products such as Replit, v0, Same.new, Create.xyz, and a few more etc.

Surely, there might be other agents creating Neon databases so we might be under-counting.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#49

Post by kjuulh »

tuukkah wrote: post #29
kjuulh wrote: post #23

Congratulations to the Neon team. To be honest this is a little sad for me. I'd hoped that Neon would be able to fill the vacuum left by CockroachDB going "business source" Being bought by DataBricks makes Neon far less interesting to me. I simply don't trust such a large organisation that has previously had issues acquiring companies, to really care about what is pretty much the most important infrastructure I've go…

> 5. Yugabyte: interesting technology, had some of the same compatibility issues, but less that the others, as they're also using the query engine from postgresql as far as I can tell. Neon is Postgres.

That is why I was hopeful for Neon unlike a lot of the other ones. Yugabyte however isn't just postgres.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#50

Post by kjuulh »

phrotoma wrote: post #25
kjuulh wrote: post #23

Congratulations to the Neon team. To be honest this is a little sad for me. I'd hoped that Neon would be able to fill the vacuum left by CockroachDB going "business source" Being bought by DataBricks makes Neon far less interesting to me. I simply don't trust such a large organisation that has previously had issues acquiring companies, to really care about what is pretty much the most important infrastructure I've go…

> same downsides as other wire compatible postgresql alternatives I'm interested if you'd care to elaborate.

Mainly in relation to notify/listen and advisory locks. Most of our code bases use advisory lock based migration tools. It would be a large lift moving to an alternative or building a migration scheduler out of process
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