Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by impulser_ » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:30 AM UTC

These Postgres, and serverless databases are all so overhyped. I have tried all of them and they all are much slower than just deploying a managed database in the same datacenter as your application.

I have an application deployed on Railway with a Postgres database and the user's latency is consistent 150ms. The same application deployed on these serverless/edge provider is anywhere between 300-400ms with random spikes to 800ms. The same application, same data, and same query.

The edge and serverless has to be the biggest scam in cloud industry right now.

They aren't faster, and they aren't cheaper. You could argue they are easier to scale, but that not he case anymore since everyone provides autoscaling now.

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

#112

Post by ThePowerOfFuet » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:43 AM UTC

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…

>Should have sobered up before writing this though. But who cares.

In vino veritas, and all that; we appreciate your honesty!

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

#113

Post by ethbr1 » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:59 AM UTC

arccy wrote: post #107

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

From context in parent, I'm reading as the sort of person who looks more competent than they are and skates from job to job quickly enough that no one notices.

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

#114

Post by joshuanapoli » Tue, May 06, 2025, 11:25 AM UTC

ethbr1 wrote: post #113

arccy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From context in parent, I'm reading as the sort of person who looks more competent than they are and skates from job to job quickly enough that no one notices.

Maybe they mean the kind of biz dev that uses small bribes (a free drink at Starbucks) to help get customers to take their call.

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

#115

Post by brap » Tue, May 06, 2025, 11:29 AM UTC

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).

I'm sorry but what is "the idea"? Managed postgres?

It seems like execution >>> idea in this case

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

#116

Post by mritchie712 » Tue, May 06, 2025, 11:33 AM UTC

impulser_ wrote: post #111

These Postgres, and serverless databases are all so overhyped. I have tried all of them and they all are much slower than just deploying a managed database in the same datacenter as your application. I have an application deployed on Railway with a Postgres database and the user's latency is consistent 150ms. The same application deployed on these serverless/edge provider is anywhere between 300-400ms with random spi…

supabase lured me in with built-in oauth, real-time, and some nice client side features in their JS lib, but I do worry about the latency sometimes.

It'd be a lot of work to run an apples to apples test with a Google Cloud Postgres db vs. Supabase and see what the difference is.

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

#117

Post by zmj » Tue, May 06, 2025, 11:35 AM UTC

999900000999 wrote: post #36

Supabase just raised 200 million. What’s with all these Postgres hosting services being worth so much now? Someone at AWS probably thought about this, easy to provision serverless Postgres, and they just didn’t build it. I’m still looking for something that can generate types and spit it out in a solid sdk. It’s amazing this isn’t a solved problem. A long long time ago, I was apart of a team trying to sort this out.…

> Someone at AWS probably thought about this, easy to provision serverless Postgres, and they just didn’t build it.

AWS is working on this as well: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-amazon-aur...

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

#118

Post by mritchie712 » Tue, May 06, 2025, 11:38 AM UTC

forgetfulness wrote: post #33

What is the lowdown on Databricks? Their bread and butter were hosted Spark and notebooks. As tasks done in Spark over a data lake began to be delegated wholesale to columnar store ELT, they tried to pivot to "lake houses", then I sort of lost track of them after I got out of Spark myself. Did Delta Lake ever catch on? Where are they going now?

Delta Lake is not catching on, but no worries, they bought Iceberg[0] (the competing standard).

I'm joking, but only a bit. Iceberg is open source (Apache), but a lot of the core team and the creator worked at Tabular and Databricks bought them for $1B.

0 - https://www.definite.app/blog/databricks-tabular-acquisition

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

#119

Post by mritchie712 » Tue, May 06, 2025, 11:45 AM UTC

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…

The "datalake" is becoming a bit of a commodity. It's getting pretty easy to spin one up yourself[0] using completely open source components.

Databricks and Microsoft (thru Fabric) are trying to build a complete data platform, i.e. ELT + datalake + BI

My bet with Definite (https://www.definite.app/) has been this is too hairy for a large company to do well and we can do it better.

0 - https://www.definite.app/blog/cloud-iceberg-duckdb-aws

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

#120

Post by cpursley » Tue, May 06, 2025, 12:00 PM UTC

impulser_ wrote: post #111

These Postgres, and serverless databases are all so overhyped. I have tried all of them and they all are much slower than just deploying a managed database in the same datacenter as your application. I have an application deployed on Railway with a Postgres database and the user's latency is consistent 150ms. The same application deployed on these serverless/edge provider is anywhere between 300-400ms with random spi…

Whatever. I was able to set up Neon Postgres in 5 mins. It’s still crazy fast with my Fly services, has replication out of the box and backups. Much easier than AWS and from what I can tell, getting something going with Railway. And I don’t have to worry about operating it. My time is valuable.