Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

upstartsmedia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 177 posts

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

#131

Post by thr0w »

rogermavis wrote: post #86
bokenator wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which open source option did you end up going with? I'm in the same boat and would like to evaluate my options.

My stack atm is neovim, python/R, an EC2 and postgres (sometimes Sql Server). Some use of arrow and duckdb. For queries on less than few hundred GB this stack does great. Fast, familiar, the ec2 is running 24/7 so it's there when I need it and can easily schedule overnight jobs, and no time wasted waiting for it to boot.

> Fast > ec2

Are you doing this on EBS? Honest question.

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

#132

Post by _1tem »

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…

Even managed databases are a scam. You can easily get 10x cheaper pricing for the same workload, by, wait for it, installing Postgres yourself on a baremetal machine. Plus you get much better performance, no noisy neighbors, and ability to actually control and measure low level performance. I never got the hype for serverless. Why are people so allergic to setting up a server? It takes a few hours a year of investment, and the performance benefits are huge.

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

#133

Post by _1tem »

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.

400ms added latency is really bad for user experience. Do a few queries and you’re going to need to add caching. Now you’re spending your precious developer time managing caching invalidation in lots of places instead of just setting up your database properly in the beginning.

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

#134

Post by ignoreusernames »

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…

> Folks I know in the industry are not very happy with databricks

Yeah, big companies globing up everything does not lead to a healthy ecosystem. Congrats on the founders for their the acquisition but everyone else loses with movements like this.

I'm still sour after their Redash purchase that instantly "killed" the open source version. Tabular acquisition was also a bit controversial since one of the founders is the PMC Chair for Iceberg which "competes" directly with Databricks own delta lake. The mere presence of these giants (mostly databricks and snowflake) makes the whole data ecosystem (both closed and open source) really hostile.

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

#135

Post by mbreese »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #127
mbreese wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I completely agree... in my comment, the word "competent" was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

And it begs comparisons to comments about Dropbox/rsync, etc...

But, I personally think the Neon concept of branching databases with CoW storage is quite interesting. That, combined with cost-management with autoscaling does seem like at least a serviceable moat.

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

#136

Post by jmull »

brap wrote: post #115
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

More specifically, the idea is "serverless" posgres.

But as I mentioned, I mean from a tech standpoint... If you're interested, they've posted various things about how the tech works.

> It seems like execution >>> idea in this case

I don't know what >>> means here, so possibly I complete agree or perhaps completely disagree.

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

#137

Post by senderista »

cactusfrog wrote: post #92
richardw wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capture enterprise AI enthusiasm by providing a 1-stop shop for data and AI, optionally hosted on your own cloud tenant. Keep deploying functionality so clients never need another supplier. Partner with SAP, OpenAI, anyone who holds market share. Buy anyone that either helps growth or might help a competitor grow. Enterprise view: delegate AI environment to Databricks unless you’re a real player. Market is too chaoti…

A nice UI for a data lake house is underrated. I use AWS Athena at my work and it is just so bad for no good reason. For example, big columns of text are expanded outwards making reading the subsequent columns impossible.

Well UI has never exactly been Amazon's strong suit.

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

#138

Post by senderista »

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

The whole point of a serverless platform is that it's hosted infrastructure. Open source doesn't mean it's feasible to run it yourself.

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

#139

Post by senderista »

zmj wrote: post #117
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...

DSQL is genuinely serverless (much more so than "Aurora Serverless"), but it's a very long way from vanilla Postgres. Think of it more like a SQL version of DynamoDB.

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

#140

Post by kwillets »

avg_dev wrote: post #71
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.

hmm, what is a serverless Pg? I don't quite understand. I thought you needed a database server if you wanted to run Pg.

It's only serverless in the way it commits transactions to cloud storage, making the server instance ephemeral; otherwise it has a server process with compute and in-memory buffer pool almost identical to pg, with the same overheads.
Post reply on HN