Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M • Hacker News Board

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#21

Post by fsckboy » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 10:10 PM UTC

FridgeSeal wrote: post #13

steveBK123 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

is it open source? (this? https://github.com/neondatabase/neon.git ) and since it's serverless, in terms of being on the internet what are you saying has disappeared, a proprietary version? support/consulting contracts?

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#22

Post by open592 » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 10:11 PM UTC

debarshri wrote: post #19

I think $250M is fairly low. Must be a good deal for snowflake.

With Neon going to Databricks, the pool of potential buyers dramatically shrank.

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#23

Post by redwood » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 10:18 PM UTC

chachra wrote: post #2

Bummer that all the postgres serverless providers are getting acquired. First Neon, now this. Hope the innovation and competitive pricing continues!

There's still Xata. And plenty of other options that support a Postgres compatible API like CockroachDB and Yugabyte.

The problem is there's so much sprawl in this postgres ecosystem that it seems like no one other than the hyperscalers is really able to reach a escape velocity...

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#24

Post by jrochkind1 » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 10:24 PM UTC

any guesses as to whether existing products will remain?

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#25

Post by antibios » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 10:30 PM UTC

fredthestair wrote: post #15

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..

I run a two service cluster in the home lab for fun. I use PVC mapped to a NFS share for the actual data so you could always run a local postgres binary against it. In a production environment I would map these to local disk partitions like you would normally do for a db.

The upgrade process is actually quite nice when it works but it is "another" thing to learn and troubleshoot.

I think of CRDs as a troubleshooting flowchart that someone with more experience than me has put together. When it's right it's great and when it's wrong it makes trouble shooting harder. That is until you remember that the whole point of k8s is ephemeral containers. When one breaks just delete it and let pgcluster CRD resync the data.

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#26

Post by brightball » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 10:32 PM UTC

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?

Crunchydata is an excellent vendor and a purist in the ecosystem. The Crunchydata Warehouse product was also extremely compelling.

It’s probably worth it just for their people.

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#27

Post by AnnaPali » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 10:41 PM UTC

chachra wrote: post #2

Bummer that all the postgres serverless providers are getting acquired. First Neon, now this. Hope the innovation and competitive pricing continues!

Sounds like time to build up a new postgres serverless company and get acquihired/exited!

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#28

Post by buremba » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 10:47 PM UTC

It's interesting that Snowflake went shopping for Crunchy Data over Neon. While Neon focused on bringing compute and storage separation to OLTP, Crunchy Data focused more on bringing OLTP/PostgreSQL closer to OLAP with DuckDB and Iceberg.

In a way, Crunch Data was a competitor to Snowflake as they literally name themselves as "Postgresql Data Warehouse" but correct me if I'm wrong. Neon sounds more complementary to Snowflake as they were struggling with an OLTP backend, namely their Unistore product, which was announced 3 years ago but never went into general availability due to its scalability issues.

Maybe Neon was 4x more expensive, but this acquisition sounds more like an answer to Databricks than a strategic acquisition if I'm being honest. Apparently, Crunchy had $30M ARR, so it's 8x ARR, which is a cheaper answer to Databricks.

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#29

Post by achristmascarl » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 10:53 PM UTC

debarshri wrote: post #19

I think $250M is fairly low. Must be a good deal for snowflake.

I wonder what accounts for the gap between this and Neon's $1B price tag. Is the deal structured less favorably for Neon? Does Neon have significantly more revenue?

Seems like Neon raised a lot more venture funding, too.

Re: Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

#30

Post by tristan957 » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 10:57 PM UTC

FridgeSeal wrote: post #13

steveBK123 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean by this? Neon is still operating the same service.

Source: I work there.