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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

#141

Post by mdaniel »

senderista wrote: post #138
mdaniel wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole point to you, but the whole point to me was having scale-to-zero because Aurora Serverless hurp-durp-ed on that. And I deeply enjoy the ability to fix bugs instead of contacting AWS Support with my hat in my hand asking to be put on some corporate backlog for 2073

Thankfully, you can continue to pay Databricks whatever they ask for the privilege of them hosting it for you

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

#142

Post by mdaniel »

ddorian43 wrote: post #103
mdaniel wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't easily add &exclude_maintainers=true but https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Acl... sure does look like quite a bit of merged contributions to me, which is not what I would consider "code dump"

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

#143

Post by senderista »

mdaniel wrote: post #141
senderista wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole point to you , but the whole point to me was having scale-to-zero because Aurora Serverless hurp-durp-ed on that. And I deeply enjoy the ability to fix bugs instead of contacting AWS Support with my hat in my hand asking to be put on some corporate backlog for 2073 Thankfully, you can continue to pay Databricks whatever they ask for the privilege of them hosting it for you

Aurora Serverless v2 now scales to zero[1]. And DSQL does pretty much by definition (they use an architecture closer to Neon).

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-scaling-to...

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

#144

Post by cpursley »

cpursley wrote: post #121
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.

*encourages sane modeling. I can’t type today.

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

#146

Post by cpursley »

_1tem wrote: post #133
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.

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.

Except it's not between neon and fly:

https://neon.tech/blog/how-to-minimise-the-impact-of-databas...

https://neon.tech/demos/regional-latency

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

#147

Post by sitkack »

vhcr wrote: post #81
sitkack wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will all forced to go serverless because new grads can't use the command line. Running a database is about the hardest thing you can do. If it is serverless, you don't need special skills, preventing employees from becoming valuable lowers costs across the board.

Have you tried being less jaded? Running a database is NOT about the hardest thing you can do.

When running a service, databases are the hardest to run. K8S still doesn't handle them well (this is by design), so they are the first thing to get outsourced to a managed service.

This is me being less jaded. Support those little wins!

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

#148

Post by ajma »

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?

when you got out of Spark, what did you go to?

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

#149

Post by joshstrange »

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

Neon goes further than just "managed postgres". I would say one of their big features is just how fast and easy you can spin up new db/clusters. It's completely possible (encouraged) to spin up 1 DB per tennant and potentially spin u and tear down 1000's of databases.

It opens up some interesting ideas/concepts when creating an isolated DB is just as easy as creating a new db table.

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

#150

Post by tibbar »

woooooo wrote: post #54
ivape wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprises have lots of data. They store it somewhere, and there are multiple vendors that provide such "credible" infrastructure for this type of storage. Think of it like, your dad says he's willing to get a dog, but only trusts these-five-animal-shelters and nothing else. That doesn't mean that's correct (that those are the only places to get a dog), it just means that's what he trusts. Databricks is most likely…

So, I'm not sure if this is less cynical or more cynical, but.. have you ever talked to the decision-makers who buy something like databricks? They can't build it themselves, and it's highly dubious that they'd be able to hire and supervise someone to build it. Databricks may be selling "nothing special", but it's needed, and the buyers can't build it themselves.

The thing is, it's actually a very difficult engineering/research/infra problem to run complicated queries on enormous data lakes. All the obvious ways to do it are prohibitively slow and expensive. Every bit of performance you can squeeze out of this, you unlock the ability for people to work with their data more easily. So there is huge value in having some centralized companies sink lots of R&D into trying to solve these problems well.
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