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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

#121

Post by cpursley »

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.…

Supabase is not just a hosted Postgres, it’s a full(ish) backend stack built on open source components comparable with something like firebase. But being Postgres, encourages same data modeling (and an escape hatch). Their type generation and SDK is quite good, too. It’s one of my favorite services and powers to projects of mine, soon to be 3.

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

#122

Post by tomrod »

joshuanapoli wrote: post #114
ethbr1 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of all the images I imagined, it's not this one.

BDev can be good or bad. Bad ones tend to not follow up, and Starbucks here represents they have poor decision making skills (reinforced by going on PTO for three months and not following up on commitments).

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

#123

Post by mbreese »

cpursley wrote: post #120
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.

All of that can be true. What I wonder is — if that all is true — how much of a moat is there around that? It seems like the secret sauce in that company isn’t some custom technology, it’s execution. Execution can be replicated by another competent team. Or is there some other secret sauce that I can’t see?

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

#124

Post by impulser_ »

cpursley wrote: post #120
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.

These are features of any managed database service.

DigitalOcean, Railway, Render, and so on all offer the exact same feature except it's just pure Postgres and you can deploy them in the same data center as your application.

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

#125

Post by sys13 »

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…

Very unlikely that Databricks would be acquired by Azure. So much of their business is on AWS, and they are invested in by AWS/Azure/GCP.

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

#126

Post by bluecheese452 »

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

Thought the same. I mean I don’t drink it because I can make my own far cheaper but I don’t look on with scorn at those who do. It says a lot more about the person making the judgment than those who drink the coffee.

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

#127

Post by datadrivenangel »

mbreese wrote: post #123
cpursley wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All of that can be true. What I wonder is — if that all is true — how much of a moat is there around that? It seems like the secret sauce in that company isn’t some custom technology, it’s execution. Execution can be replicated by another competent team. Or is there some other secret sauce that I can’t see?

Execution is some of the hardest secret sauce of all

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

#128

Post by datadrivenangel »

rogermavis wrote: post #93
creeksai wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally understand if Databricks doesn't fit your use cases. But you are doing a disingenuous comparison here because one can keep a "serverful" cluster up without shutting it down, and in that case, you'd never need to wait for anything to boot up. If you shut down your EC2 instances, it will also take time to boot up. Alternatively, you can use the (relatively new) serverless offering from them that gets you comp…

To ensure I'm not speaking incorrectly (as I was going from memory), I grep'ed my several years' of databricks notes. Oh boy.. the memories came flooding back! We had 8 data engineers onboarding the org to databricks, it was only after 2 solid years before they got to working on serverless (it was because users complained of user unfriendliness of 'nodes', and managers of cost). But then, there were problems. A commo…

This matches my experiences as well. Databricks is great if 1. your data is actually big (processing 10s/100s of terabytes daily), and 2. you don't care about money.

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

#129

Post by mohon »

fock wrote: post #95
mohon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

basically they separate the compute and storage into different components, where the traditional PG use both compute and storage at the same server. because of this separation, the compute (e.q SQL parsing, etc) can be scaled independently and the storage can also do the same, which for example use AWS S3 so if your SQL query is CPU heavy, then Neon can just add more "compute" nodes while the "storage" cluster remain…

So how is this distributed Postgres still an ACID-compliant database? If you allow multiple nodes to query the same data this likely is just Trino/an OLAP-tool using Postgres syntax? Or did they rebuild Postgres and not upstream anything?

They keep using the core Postgre while they touch the storage layer to works with S3. Can try ro read more here https://jack-vanlightly.com/analyses/2023/11/15/neon-serverl...

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

#130

Post by cpursley »

impulser_ wrote: post #124
cpursley wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are features of any managed database service. DigitalOcean, Railway, Render, and so on all offer the exact same feature except it's just pure Postgres and you can deploy them in the same data center as your application.

Render nor DO offer logical replication and are missing some other features.
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