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Databricks acquires Neon

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Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#121

Post by gopalv »

Robdel12 wrote: post #45

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.

> Really hope this doesn’t change them too much.

My guess is that this team gets rolled into Online Tables tech, which would make product sense.

https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/machine-learning/feature-...

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#123

Post by bittermandel »

lars_francke wrote: post #93
jamesblonde wrote: post #74

Data warehousing is quickly becoming a commodity through open-source. I know a company who had 2PBs+ of data in Cloudera. But instead of moving to the cloud (and Databricks), they saved 5X costs by building their own analytics platform with Iceberg, Trino and Superset. The k8s operators are enterprise quality now. On-premises S3 is good, too. You can have great hardware (servers with 128 cpus and 1 TB) and networking…

Anyone looking for an open-source Cloudera alternative based on Kubernetes operators. We're building one (~5 years old now): https://stackable.tech/ & https://github.com/stackabletech/ On-premise open-source S3 is a problem though. MinIO is not something we're touching and other than that it looks a bit empty with enterprise ready solutions.

Wouldn't Rook be a good solution? It's definitely proven in much larger settings than Minio, as it's just Ceph.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#124

Post by breadwinner »

davidgomes wrote: post #26

Hey everyone, I'm an engineer at Neon and I wanted to share this FAQ which covers a lot of the questions that are being brought up in the comments here: https://neon.tech/databricks-faq We're really excited about this, and will try to respond to some of the questions people have here later.

Love Neon, but that FAQ is worthless. Every company that gets acquired reassures customers that "nothing will change"... then it does, once the new company is in the acquirer's belly and gets digested.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#125

Post by gen220 »

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…

In my brief experience as an engineer (2014->), I've learned that the best "modern" alternative to PostgreSQL at year X has been PostgreSQL at year X+5. :)

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#126

Post by tomjakubowski »

isignal wrote: post #102
mritchie712 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Databricks started in 2013 when Spark sucked (it still does) and they aimed to make it better / faster (which they do). The product is still centered Spark, but most companies don't want or need Spark and a combination of Iceberg and DuckDB will work for 95% of companies. It's cheaper, just as fast or faster and way easier to reason about. We're building a data platform around that premise at Definite[0]. It includes…

Aren't the alternatives you mentioned - icerberg and duckdb - both storage solutions while spark is a way to express distributed compute? I'm a bit out of touch with this space, is there a newer way to express distributed compute?

DuckDB is not only a storage solution. It can directly query a variety of file formats at rest, without having to re-store anything. That's one of its selling points: you can query across archival/log data stored in S3 (or wherever) without needing to "ingest" anything or double-pay to duplicate the data you've already stored.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#127

Post by viccis »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #3

Maybe unrelated but Databricks is the most annoying garbage I have ever had to use. It fascinates me how anyone uses it by choice.

They push Serverless so hard but there are SO MANY limitations and surprise gotchas. It's driving me absolutely insane.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#128

Post by Robdel12 »

swyx wrote: post #112
Robdel12 wrote: post #45

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.

what if you had joined at neon's previous valuation (whatever it was) and got a sudden payday (assuming you had juuuust enough vesting)

I was a very early employee at the other two start ups that were acquired and even with equity it was not worth it. After all the class A shares were paid out, the rest of us got little.

I mean, hindsight 20/20 here, but I would have loved the theoretical money @ 1 billion. But those are so rare and my experience in the past 15 years hasn’t matched those unicorns.

Basically I’ve come to the conclusion unless you have serious equity or you’re a founder, acquisition suck. You’re the one doing the work making these two companies come together, while the founders usually bounce or are stripped of any real power to change things.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#129

Post by Robdel12 »

no_wizard wrote: post #87
Robdel12 wrote: post #45

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.

Had personally the opposite experience. Acquisitions being one of the most interesting times to be hired into. In a couple cases I’ve been recruited because I have a history of scaling and integrating acquisitions into companies successfully

The first acquisition I was apart of wasn’t too bad! But we were still culturally very different. So after 2 years and properly transitioning things, I bounced to another start up.

Walking into something like that is tough because the two teams sort of don’t like each other and you’re really “neither”. I’d want to make sure I was interviewed by both teams

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#130

Post by mritchie712 »

isignal wrote: post #102
mritchie712 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Databricks started in 2013 when Spark sucked (it still does) and they aimed to make it better / faster (which they do). The product is still centered Spark, but most companies don't want or need Spark and a combination of Iceberg and DuckDB will work for 95% of companies. It's cheaper, just as fast or faster and way easier to reason about. We're building a data platform around that premise at Definite[0]. It includes…

Aren't the alternatives you mentioned - icerberg and duckdb - both storage solutions while spark is a way to express distributed compute? I'm a bit out of touch with this space, is there a newer way to express distributed compute?

duckdb is primarily a query engine. It does have a storage format, but one of it's strengths is querying data where it already resides (e.g. a parquet file sitting in S3).

There are some examples[0] of enabling DuckDB to manage distributed workloads, but these are pretty experimental.

0 - https://www.definite.app/blog/smallpond

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