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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

#161

Post by _1tem »

cpursley wrote: post #146
_1tem wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I understand there are ways to deal with the problem of latency in serverless, but this is a problem I'd rather not deal with in the first place. The database IS the application, and I would not want to sacrifice speed of the database for anything. Serverless is totally not worth the trade-off for me: slightly more convenient deployments, for much higher latency to the database.

I'm a solo dev that has been installing and running my own database server with backups for decades and have never had a problem with it. It's so simple, and I have no idea why people are so allergic to managing their own server. 99% of apps can run very snappily on a single server, and the simplicity is a breath of fresh air.

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

#162

Post by _1tem »

tristan957 wrote: post #156
_1tem wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not just cold start (another problem you have to worry about with serverless). There's the simple fact that network latency outside of the same datacenter is ALWAYS slow and randomly unpredictable, especially if you have to run multiple queries just to render a single page to your user. A database should always be over LAN in my opinion, if you need to access data over the internet, at that point it should be over an API/HTTP, not internal database access.

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

#163

Post by vladich »

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?

It's the team, they have a few Postgres committers and major contributors, and there are not that many of them. But that's a bit precarious, the team may leave after the acquisition for many reasons.

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

#164

Post by AlexeyBelov »

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? What do you mean?

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

#165

Post by atombender »

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…

Isn't this an apples-to-orange comparison?

Neon's multi-region support isn't directly comparable to a single Postgres database in a single data center. You can set up Neon in a single data center, too, and I would expect the same performance in that case.

Meanwhile, if you tried to scale your single-Postgres to a multi-region setup, you'd expect higher latencies relative to the location of your data.

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

#166

Post by 999900000999 »

cpursley wrote: post #159
999900000999 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Firebase let's you write functions in normal node js and Python.

Supabase only supports Deno. The quirkiness is my own server side logic. Tbf, I've tried to build this project at least 4 times and I might need to take a step back.

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

#167

Post by crowcroft »

aurareturn wrote: post #84
crowcroft wrote: post #75

If I'm guessing this either: 1. An acquihire (if your a Neon customer this would probably be a bad outcome for you). 2. A growth play. Neon will be positioned as an 'application layer' product offered cheap to bring SaaS startups into the ecosystem. As those growth startups grow and need more services sell them everything else.

Who pays $1b for an acquihire?

Character AI is the only one I can think of. Although point taken, there must be more going on than a pure acquihire.

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

#168

Post by pdimitar »

_1tem wrote: post #161
cpursley wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I understand there are ways to deal with the problem of latency in serverless, but this is a problem I'd rather not deal with in the first place. The database IS the application, and I would not want to sacrifice speed of the database for anything. Serverless is totally not worth the trade-off for me: slightly more convenient deployments, for much higher latency to the database. I'm a solo dev that has been installin…

That's why I'm working hard on bringing in a tightly integrated support for SQLite in the Elixir ecosystem (via a Rust FFI bridge): because in my professional experience not many applications need something as hardcore and amazing as PostgreSQL; at least 80% of all apps I ever witnessed would be just fine with an embedded database.

I share similar experiences like yours and others in this thread, and to me all those operational concerns grow into unnecessary noise that distracts from the real problems that we are paid to solve.

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

#169

Post by fock »

mohon wrote: post #129
fock wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thank you, very nice read! (Though from some scanning it looks like it mostly helps reads)
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