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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

#81

Post by vhcr »

sitkack wrote: post #17
whateveracct wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but ultimately that's a cost thing, right? Because you can solve those problems through other means and by hiring internally. Serverless is meant to obviate some of that. But it is less compelling when the vendor tries to gobble up that margin for themselves.

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.

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

#82

Post by bokenator »

rogermavis wrote: post #78
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?

It provides central place to store and query data. A big org might have a few hundred databases for various purposes - databricks lets data engineers set up pipelines to ETL that data into databricks and when the data is there it can be queried (using spark, so there's some downsides - namely a more restrictive SQL variant - but some advantages - better performance across very large datasets). Personally, I hated dat…

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

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

#83

Post by LtWorf »

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.

Marketing speech.

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

#84

Post by aurareturn »

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?

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

#85

Post by udev4096 »

LtWorf wrote: post #83
avg_dev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Marketing speech.

You shouldn't be getting downvoted. Serverless is nothing more than a hype which is meant to overcharge you instead of running it on a server owned by you

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

#86

Post by rogermavis »

bokenator wrote: post #82
rogermavis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It provides central place to store and query data. A big org might have a few hundred databases for various purposes - databricks lets data engineers set up pipelines to ETL that data into databricks and when the data is there it can be queried (using spark, so there's some downsides - namely a more restrictive SQL variant - but some advantages - better performance across very large datasets). Personally, I hated dat…

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.

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

#87

Post by creeksai »

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.

You mentioned earlier about how long it would take to acquire a new cluster in Databricks, but you are comparing it here to something that's always on here. In a much larger environment, your setup is not really practical to have a lot of people collaborating.

Note that Databricks SQL Serverless these days can be provisioned in a few seconds.

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

#88

Post by th0ma5 »

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.

Is that how Databricks sees their customers? Yikes

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

#89

Post by rogermavis »

creeksai wrote: post #87
rogermavis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mentioned earlier about how long it would take to acquire a new cluster in Databricks, but you are comparing it here to something that's always on here. In a much larger environment, your setup is not really practical to have a lot of people collaborating. Note that Databricks SQL Serverless these days can be provisioned in a few seconds.

> you are comparing it here to something that's always on

That's the point. Our org was told databricks would solve problems we just didn't have. Serverful has some wonderful advantages: simplicity, (ironically) cheaper (than something running just 3-4 hours a day but which costs 10x), familiarity, reliability. Serverless also has advantages, but only if it runs smoothly, doesn't take an eternity to boot, isn't prohibitively expensive, and has little friction before using it - databricks meets 0/4 of those critera, with the additional downside of restrictive SQL due to spark backend, adding unnecessary refactoring/complexity to queries.

> your setup is not really practical to have a lot of people collaborating

Hard disagree. Our methods are simple and time-tested. We use git to share code (100x improvement on databricks' version of git). We share data in a few ways, the most common are by creating a table in a database or in S3. It doesn't have to be a whole lot more complicated.

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

#90

Post by vasco »

udev4096 wrote: post #85
LtWorf wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing speech.

You shouldn't be getting downvoted. Serverless is nothing more than a hype which is meant to overcharge you instead of running it on a server owned by you

That's a reductionist view of a technical aspect because of the way the technical aspect is sold. Serverless are VMs that launch and turn off extremely quickly, so much so that they open up new ways of using said compute.

You can deploy serverless technologies in a self hosted setup and not get "overcharged". Is a system thread bullshit marketing over a system process?

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