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Databricks acquires Neon

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Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#91

Post by bobxmax »

dan_goosewin wrote: post #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, a…

Are people still making comments like these in 2025?

What the hell do profits have to do with valuing tech startups?

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#92

Post by anilshanbhag »

hlpn wrote: post #83
jamesblonde wrote: post #74

Data 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…

Totally agree. Happy open source StarRocks user here using the k8s operator for customer-facing analytics on terabytes of data. There's very little need for Databricks in my world.

Looking at StarRocks site (https://www.starrocks.io/), they compare against Clickhouse, Druid and Trino. Don't even compare against Spark/Databricks! Guess Spark is just not competitive.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#93

Post by lars_francke »

jamesblonde wrote: post #74

Data 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…

Anyone looking for an open-source Cloudera alternative based on Kubernetes operators. We're building one (~5 years old now): https://stackable.tech/ & https://github.com/stackabletech/

On-premise open-source S3 is a problem though. MinIO is not something we're touching and other than that it looks a bit empty with enterprise ready solutions.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#94

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #3

Maybe unrelated but Databricks is the most annoying garbage I have ever had to use. It fascinates me how anyone uses it by choice.

Databricks is the Jira of dealing with data. No one wants to use it, it sucks, there are too many features to try to appease all possible users but none of them particularly good, and there are substantially better options now than there were not long ago. I would never, ever use it by choice.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#96

Post by dan_goosewin »

bobxmax wrote: post #91
dan_goosewin wrote: post #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, a…

Are people still making comments like these in 2025? What the hell do profits have to do with valuing tech startups?

Profitability might not be as relevant as it used to be in M&A discussions, but it matters when you’re paying $1B.

Valuations like this only make sense if there’s a clear path to significant strategic leverage or future cash flow.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#97

Post by drewnick »

jenny91 wrote: post #58

It'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?

For small personal projects, coolify (featured recently here on HN) lets you quickly stand up postgres with SSL, etc. and get a connection string in seconds. You can deploy in the same project or expose pg to the world like neon does.

One click turns it off, or you can just leave it on. A $5 VM will run a lot of small postgres.

I use both neon and coolify, and could live with either, though apples and oranges when it comes to the data branching feature. But a quick pg_dump/restore which could even be scripted solves my problem. Disclaimer: I like devops in addition to just dev.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#98

Post by chime »

tudorg wrote: post #10
Squarex wrote: post #6

I’ve loved Neon and now I’m a little worried. Are there any alternatives?

[Disclaimer: I work for Xata] As it happens, we've just launched our new Xata platform ( https://xata.io/ ) which has some of the key Neon features: instant copy-on-write branching and separation of storage and compute. As an extra twist, we also can do anonymization (PII masking) between your production database and developer branches. The way we do copy-on-write branches is a bit different. We haven't done any modi…

1. Would you sign BAA (for HIPAA) for the Pay As You Go plan? Can't find that anywhere on your site except for that Lite is HIPAA compliant (https://lite.xata.io/security).

2. FYI, couldn't request access via the BYOC form so I sent an email as per the error: There was an error, please try again or contact us at info@xata.io.

Re: Databricks acquires Neon

#100

Post by kristjansson »

robertkoss wrote: post #13
flanked-evergl wrote: post #3

Maybe unrelated but Databricks is the most annoying garbage I have ever had to use. It fascinates me how anyone uses it by choice.

I used to be a big fan of the platform because back in 2020 / 2021 it really was the only reasonable choice compared to AWS / Azure / Snowflake for building data platforms. Today it suffers from feature creep and too many pivots & acquisitions. That they are insanely bad at naming features doesn't help either.

I’d settle for only one bad name per feature from them. Alas, they don’t feel so limited
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