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Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

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Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#101

Post by pm90 »

walamaking wrote: post #96
rogermavis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It provides central place to store and query data. A big org might have a few hundred databases for various purposes - databricks lets data engineers set up pipelines to ETL that data into databricks and when the data is there it can be queried (using spark, so there's some downsides - namely a more restrictive SQL variant - but some advantages - better performance across very large datasets). Personally, I hated dat…

Dumb question - how is this different from Snowflake?

they are competitors and are similar. Snowflake popularized the cloud datawarehouse concept (after aws fumbled it big with Redshift). DB is the hot new tool.

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#102

Post by spratzt »

speakfreely wrote: post #45
taw1285 wrote: post #37

I am fairly new to all this data pipeline services (Databricks, Snowflakes etc). Say right now I have an e-commerce site with 20K MAU. All metrics are going to Amplitude and we can use that to see DAU, retention, and purchase volume. At what point in my startup lifecycle do we need to enlist the services?

A non-trivial portion of my consulting work over the past 10 years has been working on data pipelines at various big corporations that move absurdly small amounts of data around using big data tools like spark. I would not worry about purchasing services from Databricks, but I would definitely try to poach their sales people if you can.

I used to do similar work. Back in the day I used 25 TB as the cut off point for single node design. It’s certainly larger now.

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#103

Post by ddorian43 »

mdaniel wrote: post #59
clpm4j wrote: post #6

I've been seriously considering neon for a new application. This definitely gives me pause... maybe plain ol' Postgres is going to be the winner for me again.

Lucky you, you still can as it's Apache 2 https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/blob/release-8516/LICEN... I haven't studied the CLA situation in order to know if a rug pull is on the table but Tofu and Valkey have shown that where there's a will there's a way

It's open source like a code dump. There's no support for open source IIRC.

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#104

Post by omneity »

daniel_levine wrote: post #76
omneity wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serverless in the context of Postgres means to decouple storage and compute, so you could scale compute "infinitely" without setting up replica servers. This is what Neon offers, where you can just keep hitting their endpoints with your pg client and it should just take whatever load (in principle) and bill you per request. Supabase gives you a server that runs classic Postgres in a process. Scaling in this scenario…

https://supabase.com/blog/supabase-acquires-oriole

Interesting. Maybe a new product line will come out of this.

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#105

Post by blitzar »

xyst wrote: post #16
jmull wrote: post #7

Wow, $1B. I've been bullish on neon for a while -- the idea hits exactly the right spot, IMO, and their execution looks good in my limited experience. But I mean that from a technical perspective. I never have any real idea about the business -- do they have an edge that makes people want to start paying them money and keep paying them money? Heck if I know. I guess that's going to be Databricks problem now (maybe).

Actual revenue is irrelevant. This is a business decision to corner the market.

No, no no no, no revenue. Why would you go after revenue?

Pre-revenue pure play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#107

Post by arccy »

wqtz wrote: post #94

Databricks acquired bit.io and subsequently shut it down quite fast. Afaik bit.io had a very small team and the founder was a serial entrepreneur who is not going to stick around and he did not. I am not sure who from bit.io is still around at databricks. If I am guessing right, Motherduck will likely be acquired by GCP because most of the founding team was ex-BQ. Snowflake purchased Modin and polars is still quite i…

starbucks drinkers is certainly a new way to describe people, though i'm not sure what image that's supposed to invoke

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#108

Post by whstl »

thrance wrote: post #3
datadrivenangel wrote: post #2

Databricks is trying hard to get into serverless, but it seems like they refuse to allow it to actually be cheaper, which defeats the purpose of serverless.

I don't think being cheaper is the main value sell of serverless. When I hear "serverless" I think "ease of deployment and automatic scaling".

Serverless is incredibly cheap for endpoints that don't get called too often, and incredibly expensive for endpoints that are.

I guess different people just have different experiences.

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#110

Post by betteryet »

Neon is a great product because they are run by Postgres enthusiasts. They have decent customer-friendly pricing, real serverless HTTP endpoints, and they're always on the latest version of Postgres as soon as it is stable. From what I can tell, no other provider has this positioning, driven by dedication.

I really hope they can maintain this dedication after acquisition, but Databricks will probably push them into enterprise and it will lose the spark. I wish Cloudflare bought them instead.

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