Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#11

Post by steveBK123 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #4

> Part of the reason Snowflake and Databricks are interested in database companies is because PostgreSQL can serve as the underlying database for customers to create AI agents with data they store in the companies’ respective platforms. I don't understand this part. What does PostgreSQL offer here that these vendors believe they can't add to their existing platform? Is it the ecosystem?

I read this as "buying potential competitors off the market" right?

Less ability for customers to roll-their-own => more customers for Snowflake?

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#12

Post by FridgeSeal »

markus_zhang wrote: post #8
kwillets wrote: post #7

Snowflake is becoming the Juicero of data.

As a DE, I have an unpopular disdain of Snowflake because it trivalize a lot of stuffs. I think I'm going to switch to OLTP given the chance.

Right there with you.

Developed my disdain after having to put up with the incredibly shitty behaviour from the sales and account teams a few years ago.

Sure they had some novelty years ago, but everyone and their dog has disaggregated compute these days, and all their other “feature” just feel like enterprise money extraction that they’ve acquihired in.

Expensive, slow, and painful.

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#13

Post by FridgeSeal »

steveBK123 wrote: post #11
candiddevmike wrote: post #4

> Part of the reason Snowflake and Databricks are interested in database companies is because PostgreSQL can serve as the underlying database for customers to create AI agents with data they store in the companies’ respective platforms. I don't understand this part. What does PostgreSQL offer here that these vendors believe they can't add to their existing platform? Is it the ecosystem?

I read this as "buying potential competitors off the market" right? Less ability for customers to roll-their-own => more customers for Snowflake?

With neon being bought by databricks, serverless Postgres tech has effectively disappeared from the market.

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#14

Post by FridgeSeal »

gk1 wrote: post #6
candiddevmike wrote: post #4

> Part of the reason Snowflake and Databricks are interested in database companies is because PostgreSQL can serve as the underlying database for customers to create AI agents with data they store in the companies’ respective platforms. I don't understand this part. What does PostgreSQL offer here that these vendors believe they can't add to their existing platform? Is it the ecosystem?

Low-latency and cheap retrieval for RAG.

But why do they need serverless Postgres for that?

They could achieve the same with normal pg, or SQLite. Or any number of other embedded DB’s. There’s also plenty of disaggregated compute options available…

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#15

Post by fredthestair »

pella wrote: post #9

github repo : https://github.com/crunchydata

Snowflake sounds like nominative determinism. I was just looking at this thing today, totally puzzled as to how to update it and postgres itself without rolling dice that it destroys everything on the cluster that uses postgres. Perhaps someone with k8s experience could explain to me why CRDs are not Singleton hell? The LLMs just run me in circles..

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#16

Post by znpy »

candiddevmike wrote: post #4

> Part of the reason Snowflake and Databricks are interested in database companies is because PostgreSQL can serve as the underlying database for customers to create AI agents with data they store in the companies’ respective platforms. I don't understand this part. What does PostgreSQL offer here that these vendors believe they can't add to their existing platform? Is it the ecosystem?

I think it’s the large ecosystem of BSD licensed stuff they can fork and relicense as proprietary software.m, because the BSD license allows that.

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#17

Post by 9283409232 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #8
kwillets wrote: post #7

Snowflake is becoming the Juicero of data.

As a DE, I have an unpopular disdain of Snowflake because it trivalize a lot of stuffs. I think I'm going to switch to OLTP given the chance.

If you're using Snowflake as an OLTP you're looking at the wrong technology anyway.

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#20

Post by redwood »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #14
gk1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low-latency and cheap retrieval for RAG.

But why do they need serverless Postgres for that? They could achieve the same with normal pg, or SQLite. Or any number of other embedded DB’s. There’s also plenty of disaggregated compute options available…

I imagine they are buying the expertise in managing the transactional system rather than the IP itself. Operationally running a transactional system is a different ballgame for these OLAP players.

(of course what they're not getting is scale readiness.. it's not like these companies have anything resembling RDS level customer workloads)

Post reply on HN