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Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

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Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found their docker-compose more helpful than their chart: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/blob/main/docker-compos... But I also needed to read their Ansible files to understand how they manage their infra better. Those are deleted now, but luckily you can just look at the history (commit that deleted it: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/commit/0d3d022eb1fe4a42... )

I found installation instructions for Neon including Ansible files here: https://percona.community/labs/serverless-postgresql/docs/in...

That is super helpful and also kinda weird that it's on the percona website and not somewhere in the Neon docs

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#112
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Databricks is a company by the people that built Spark. They've extended and their platform does a lot now.

What is Spark? I assume that’s Apache Spark, which is described as a “ unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing” Still not clear for me what to use it for :-/

It is Apache Spark. It's a framework that allows processing large amounts of data in parallel on a cluster of computers.

You can use batch processing, streaming, do machine learning and graph jobs. You usually use Scala, Java, Python or R to write your code. The code is executed in Scala, so it all gets converted to it. For example, in Python you'd use PySpark and that gets written down to its scala equivalent which is then executed.

I mainly work in Python, so I'm going to talk about some features there. But it support dataframes and exposes the data in Spark DataFrames. You build operations and those slowly build a DAG. It's not until you either execute, save or request to see the data that it actually starts executing the DAG after optimizing what it needs.

If you need something that spark doesn't support, you can use regular python, but because it won't get converted to spark, it'll run on only one node and be limited. So you have to rewrite your code optimizing for it.

You can process some data in memory, you can use disk, you can use databases. Either as source or targets.

A use case can be, load the raw data as it comes in, transform the data to your intermediary states, then write out different tables based on what they need to do.

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It's a framework that has an engine to manage code running on clusters, a language to interact with the data, abstractions and optimizations of the code, ways to store the data, checkpoints for optimizations, and other things.

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#114
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm perusing the Fabric docs and they are using Delta Lake, Spark and Azure Databricks as part of that solution

Fabric does not use Databricks, but both Databricks and Fabric rely heavily on Delta. Let's just hope that they remain compatible.

Ah, so we're in the "extend" portion of the process

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#115
post #48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some Helm charts: https://github.com/neondatabase/helm-charts For the record though, they're not enough to run neon today[0] - this has been a "problem" since neon was announced here[1]. [0]: https://github.com/neondatabase/helm-charts/issues/35#issue-... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31540691

Yes, you'd have to do some own work to set up a direct competitor from the provided pieces. They have published a new piece which is how they vertically autoscale Postgres in Kubernetes: https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling

Yeah I'm not complaining - I mention it because if you're a bit.io customer that wants to migrate to another serverless Postgres solution you won't be able to do it by "just" running the linked helm charts.

(In my opinion) when someone says here's the helm chart I assume running "helm install $THING" would give me a running version of $THING, so it's more so no one has the wrong expectations (like I would)

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#116

We’ve been moving our workflows out of Databricks to PostgreSQL to save a ton. Wonder if what they’re going to do with this would have been handy at the time.

Anything you'd be missing about Spark from doing so?

Would like to know more about the cost tradeoffs, also. Please elaborate.

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#117
post #95
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reluctantly agreeing with you. So.. you can’t trust a small shop because an MBA corp dev team at some enterprise shop is always lurking around the corner. But if you go to the behemoth instead, you can get equally screwed because you don’t mean anything to their bottom line (see exhibit Google). The commercial software “service” industry is really fucked. I don’t want another tech bust, but we sure as hell deserve on…

I feel like we learned 20 years ago that buying proprietary software has a bunch of problems, so we switched to open source software. But in the last 10 years, we started buying software services, and now we have all those problems back again (corporate stability, vendor lock-in, principal agent problems, etc.). Maybe we will learn how to run our own software at some point without fully staffed teams of SREs?

Because along the way the people creating open source software also have bills to pay, and found out that living outside Hotel Mama comes with own set of caveats.

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#118
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Till the time they are also bought and "sunsetted." That's the problem with all these shiny startups.

Not this one though, they are open source so someone else would start to offer new hosted instances: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon Some Helm charts: https://github.com/neondatabase/helm-charts It could potentially be one of their partners: Vercel https://neon.tech/docs/guides/vercel Hasura https://neon.tech/docs/guides/hasura

I keep expecting Vercel to be bought by Sitecore, given how they are replacing all the .NET stuff and pushing Vercel everywhere.

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#119

What benefits does one get from using bit.io or other equivalents compared to the AWS built in Aurora? is their offering different and I'm just confused by the jargon?

It takes < 10 seconds to go from no account to database w/ bit.io

Is the time it takes to spin up a database really a primary concern for anyone but a hobbyist? Hopefully one would take far more than 10 seconds to address the actual concerns of database work: backups, replication, upgrade procedures, access control, settings tuning, required extensions, etc.

If anything, companies are drowning in a proliferation of siloed datastores and most are highly motivated to fix that situation; the exact opposite concern of "quickly spin up a new database".

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