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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

#151

Post by joshstrange »

timenova wrote: post #73
thiagoeh wrote: post #23

Looks like the acquihire of Bit.io in 2023 wasn't enough to be able to deliver their own OLTP offering https://blog.bit.io/whats-next-for-bit-io-joining-databricks... https://www.databricks.com/blog/welcoming-bit-io-databricks-... Or it's just a business decision to corner the market, as someone else said

Okay now I am concerned. We're using Neon. We can move easily at this point, but I'm sure they have huge customers storing many terabytes of data where this may be genuinely hard to do. I went to Archive.org and figured out that in 2023, they announced they were shutting down on May 30th, all databases shutdown on June 30th, only available for downloads after that, and deleted on July 30th.

Same boat here. Not really looking to have to move but I'm incredibly thankful that I never integrated with Neon more than using Postgres. I don't depend on/need their API or other branching features.

I hate that this is what I've become, I want to try some of the cool features "postgres++" providers offer but I actively avoid most features fearing the potential future migration. I got burned using the Data API on Aurora Serverless and then leaving them and having to rewrite a bunch of code.

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

#152

Post by joshstrange »

anshumankmr wrote: post #70

Great.As someone using Neon, how might this impact me? Price bumps?

I'd be most concerned with Neon being shut down. That's what Databricks did to bit.io (another serverless Postgres provider they bought).

I'm really not looking forward to a migration.

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

#153

Post by 999900000999 »

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.

I've tried Superbase.

Their choice of Deno for edge functions is... Well, unique.

For my current project I have to do a lot of quirky logic, and I kept hitting a brick wall with Supabase.

I also didn't enjoy the self hosting journey. Not exactly easy.

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

#154

Post by forgetfulness »

ajma wrote: post #148
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?

BigQuery ELT, the org I went to was rather immature in their data practice, and I sold them on getting some proper orchestration (Dataform, their preference over DBT, and Airflow), and keeping the architecture coherent.

I'd have rather stuck with Spark just because I prefer Scala or Python to SQL (and that comes with e.g. being far easier to unit test), but life happened and that ecosystem was getting disrupted anyway.

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

#155

Post by __s »

jmull wrote: post #136
brap wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>>> means "way better than"

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

#156

Post by tristan957 »

_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.

Are you referring to cold start latencies?

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

#157

Post by tristan957 »

_1tem wrote: post #132
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 investmen…

> Even managed databases are a scam

Just because you don't derive value out of something doesn't mean it is a scam.

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

#158

Post by speakfreely »

lizard wrote: post #68
speakfreely wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A non-trivial portion of my consulting work over the past 10 years has been working on data pipelines at various big corporations that move absurdly small amounts of data around using big data tools like spark. I would not worry about purchasing services from Databricks, but I would definitely try to poach their sales people if you can.

Just curious, what would you consider, "absurdly small amounts of data around using big data tools like spark" and what do you recommend instead? I recently worked on some data pipelines with Databricks notebooks ala Azure Fabric. I'm currently using ~30% of our capacity and starting to get pushback to run things less frequently to reduce the load. I'm not convinced I actually need Fabric here, but the value for me h…

One financial services company has hundreds of Glue jobs that are using pyspark to read and write less than 4GB of data per run. These jobs run every day.

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

#159

Post by cpursley »

999900000999 wrote: post #153
cpursley wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've tried Superbase. Their choice of Deno for edge functions is... Well, unique. For my current project I have to do a lot of quirky logic, and I kept hitting a brick wall with Supabase. I also didn't enjoy the self hosting journey. Not exactly easy.

Haven't used their edge functions yet. What's the issue with Deno (I'm not familier with it)?

For the other stuff, what do you find quirky?

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

#160

Post by AbstractH24 »

Anyone notice a rapid ramp up in acquisitions?

As though folks are looking for exits but IPO isn’t an option.

Think we’re approaching a reckoning for lots of companies that raised circa 2021 at valuations that are no longer plausible and AI startups.

Oh, and ones in the first group that tried to rebrand as the second…

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