Congrats folks at Neon! Been following the team and product since the very beginning. Well done, good DX and good education content too :).
This seems like quite the pivot though
Databricks acquires Neon
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Re: Databricks acquires Neon
#72Hey everyone, I'm an engineer at Neon and I wanted to share this FAQ which covers a lot of the questions that are being brought up in the comments here: https://neon.tech/databricks-faq We're really excited about this, and will try to respond to some of the questions people have here later.
For what it's worth the questions can't really be answered by a simple FAQ, because history has shown that those answers aren't worth the page they're written on. Many companies that get bought talk all about the fact that nothing is going to change.
Something is always going to change, almost always in a way that impacts customers. In the best case it's something simple like a different name on the bill, other times it will leave customers scrambling for an alternative before a ridiculous deadline. It could happen within weeks, after a month, or it might take a year. The answers at the time of the announcement are the same regardless.
Re: Databricks acquires Neon
#73congrats to Nikita and all the wonderful folks at Neon!
Re: Databricks acquires Neon
#74Data warehousing is quickly becoming a commodity through open-source.
I know a company who had 2PBs+ of data in Cloudera. But instead of moving to the cloud (and Databricks), they saved 5X costs by building their own analytics platform with Iceberg, Trino and Superset. The k8s operators are enterprise quality now. On-premises S3 is good, too. You can have great hardware (servers with 128 cpus and 1 TB) and networking.
It's not just Trino. StarRocks and Clickhouse have enterprise grade k8s helm charts/operators. That 60bn valuation is an albtross on Databrick's neck - their pricing will have to justify it, and their core business is commoditizing.
Neon filled their product gap of not having an operational (row-oriented) DB.
Re: Databricks acquires Neon
#75So... As someone who's joining databricks in a few weeks, what's with the hate in the comments?
If you're someone who researched the company, enjoyed the interview and accepted an offer, you're probably not going to be in the same group as the people who hate Databricks. Databricks is a 10k people enterprise software company that just raised $10bn and is using their deep pockets to hoover up smaller companies. If that doesn't scare you, you'll be fine. For many of us, the thought of working with or using the product of a company like that strikes fear into our hearts because we have different values to you.
Databricks is the antithesis of Neon. Neon is driven by product, Databricks is driven by sales. Opinions of Databricks in a thread about Neon are going to be on the negative side (but not necessarily representative).
Re: Databricks acquires Neon
#76Maybe unrelated but Databricks is the most annoying garbage I have ever had to use. It fascinates me how anyone uses it by choice.
Really hard disagree. Coming from hadoop, databricks is utopia. It's stable, fast, scales really well if you have massive datasets. The biggest gripe in have is how crazy expensive it is.
Hadoop was fundamentally a batch processing system for large data files that was never intended for the sort of online reporting and analytics workloads for which the DW concept addressed. No amount of Pig and Hive and HBase and subsequent tools layered on top of it could ever change that basic fact.
Re: Databricks acquires Neon
#77[dead]
Re: Databricks acquires Neon
#78It's my understanding that Neon had some tech to basically "wake up" the DB when a request came out -- so you could "scale down to zero," if you will. I was hoping to explore this for small personal projects: I by far prefer Postgres and would love an isolated database per project. Is there an alternative for that? Scale-to-zero postgres, basically?
AWS Aurora Postgres Serverless v2 has that capability, though it takes multiple seconds.
AWS Aurora is way too expensive and their "serverless" offerings are overly complicated and not worth it IMHO.
I used Serverless v1 and then they doubled the prices for v2 while removing features so I moved to PlanetScale. They were great but as I grew and wanted multiple smaller DBs they didn't really have a good way to do that and I moved to Neon. Now, with this news, I guess I'll be looking for an alternative.
Re: Databricks acquires Neon
#79Congrats to the Neon team. They make an awesome product. Obviously it’s sad to see this, but it’s inevitable when you’re VC funded. Let’s hope Nikita and co remain strong and don’t let Databricks bit.io them.
Re: Databricks acquires Neon
#80> Neon is valued at $1B;
Neon is still early‑stage and, AFAIK, not profitable. It’s a perfect snapshot of 2025: anything that’s (1) serverless, and (2) even vaguely AI‑adjacent is trading at a multiple nobody would have believed two years ago. Also supports my hypothesis that the next 12 months will be filled with cash acquisitions.
> Databricks will ruin Neon;
I certainly hope not. Focus on DX, friendly free tier, and community support is what made it special. If that vanishes behind Databricks’ enterprise guardrails, the goodwill will vanish with it.