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Databricks acquires Neon

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Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#131

Post by datadrivenangel »

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…

But why would you buy an operational DB from Databricks? The only thing that makes sense is Databricks flailing to maintain market cap.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#132

Post by datadrivenangel »

kwillets wrote: post #108
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…

It's been a commodity for decades now. Metrics like price-performance have a long history, but the SnowBricks products fail at them quite dramatically. The difference is hard-sell vs. soft or no-sell.

Not having to buy an appliance and pay for it up front is quite a valuable option. Also the split between processing and storage allows for better archival and scaling strategies.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#133

Post by datadrivenangel »

viccis wrote: post #127
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.

And it tends to be notably more expensive! 4-5x the price for less features...

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#134

Post by mgfist »

Nate75Sanders wrote: post #105
isignal wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Flink. It has more momentum than Spark right now.

"momentum" is a tricky word. Zig has more momentum than C++, but will it ever overtake the language? I'd bet not.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#135

Post by positisop »

matt-p wrote: post #106
lars_francke wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's wrong with minio out of curiosity? Ceph an option?

Try expanding a cluster, or changing erasure coding configuration, or using anything that needs random access within a file (parquet), or any day 2 operation.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#136

Post by matt-p »

positisop wrote: post #135
matt-p wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with minio out of curiosity? Ceph an option?

Try expanding a cluster, or changing erasure coding configuration, or using anything that needs random access within a file (parquet), or any day 2 operation.

on what?

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#137

Post by no_wizard »

Robdel12 wrote: post #129
no_wizard wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>you’re really “neither”.

IMO, this is where the power of being hired into the situation is. No existing bias for either company and all the baggage that comes with that.

Allows a person to see the pros and cons of how things get done on both sides of the fence, and act accordingly

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#138

Post by jamesblonde »

gopalv wrote: post #121
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-...

Yes, that is what i expect, too. They have been paying DynamoDB and CosmosDB for a few years now. However, Neon is not competitive latency/throughput-wise for real-time workloads, needed for high end AI (like personalized recommendations). There are a few others I would have expected like Cockroach, Aerospike, or RonDB.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#139

Post by bobxmax »

dan_goosewin wrote: post #96
bobxmax wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people still making comments like these in 2025? What the hell do profits have to do with valuing tech startups?

Profitability might not be as relevant as it used to be in M&A discussions, but it matters when you’re paying $1B. Valuations like this only make sense if there’s a clear path to significant strategic leverage or future cash flow.

No, it doesn't matter when you're paying $1B. Why would it? Tech companies don't care about profits. It's easy to become profitable - tech margins are obnoxiously high. They're bought and valued for their ability to scale and rapidly absorb market share.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#140

Post by bicx »

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.

I've been part of an acquisition as a first-year engineering manager, during which I had to navigate subsequent two rounds of layoffs. I was also a part of the group to help restructure teams and help make calls on who to keep. Morale was terrible, and the cultures also did not gel at all.

It led to some serious burnout and I took several months off. I'm now happily working as an IC again.

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