Databricks acquires Neon

https://www.databricks.com/blog/databricks-neon

by davidgomes • 1 year ago

389 226 1 year ago

databricks.com

lmc• 1 year ago

Neon's blogpost: https://neon.tech/blog/neon-and-databricks

WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/databricks-to-buy-startup-neon-...

flanked-evergl• 1 year ago

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

isoprophlex• 1 year ago

The market for IBM-like software and platforms (everyone else uses this! It must be good!) apparently wasn't saturated yet

robertkoss• 1 year ago

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.

kristjansson• 1 year ago

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

winwang6• 1 year ago

I'm building another Spark-based choice now with ParaQuery (GPU-accelerated Spark): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964505

swalsh• 1 year ago

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.

willvarfar• 1 year ago

Spark was a really big step up from hadoop.

But these days just use trino or whatever. There are lots of new ways to work on data that are all bigger steps up - ergonomically, performance and price - over spark as spark was over hadoop.

DebtDeflation• 1 year ago

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.

winwang6• 1 year ago

If cost (or perf) is the issue, we're building a super-efficient, GPU-accelerated, easy-to-use Spark: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964505

DarkWiiPlayer• 1 year ago

With cookies disabled I get a blank website, which is a massive red flag and an immediate nope from me.

Can't imagine someone incapable of building a website would deliver a good (digital) product.

fuzzy_biscuit• 1 year ago

But.. but.... we MUST track you! That's the whole purpose of our site /s

fkyoureadthedoc• 1 year ago

They did build a website though. It even looks pretty nice. The restriction you've placed on yourself just prevents you from viewing it.

mritchie7122• 1 year ago

Databricks started in 2013 when Spark sucked (it still does) and they aimed to make it better / faster (which they do).

The product is still centered Spark, but most companies don't want or need Spark and a combination of Iceberg and DuckDB will work for 95% of companies. It's cheaper, just as fast or faster and way easier to reason about.

We're building a data platform around that premise at Definite[0]. It includes everything you need to get started with data (ETL, BI, datalake).

0 - https://www.definite.app/

isignal2• 1 year ago

Aren't the alternatives you mentioned - icerberg and duckdb - both storage solutions while spark is a way to express distributed compute? I'm a bit out of touch with this space, is there a newer way to express distributed compute?

apwell23• 1 year ago

Is hosting spark really that groundbreaking ? Also isn't spark kind of too complicated for 90% of enterprisey data-processing .

I really don't understand the valuation for this company. Why is it so high.

teetertater• 1 year ago

Yes, spark is too complicated for most cases;

But if you're inclined to use it, databricks' setup of spark just saves you an incredible amount of time that you'd normally waste on configuration and wiring infrastructure (storage, compute, pipelines, unified access, VPNs etc). It's expensive and opinionated, but the data engineers you need to deal with spark OOM errors constantly is greater. Also databricks' default configs give you MUCH better performance out of the box than anything DIY and you don't have to fiddle with partitions and super niche config options to get even medium workloads stable

MOARDONGZPLZ2• 1 year ago

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.

winwang6• 1 year ago

What options do you use? I don't work for Databricks but I am building my own data infra startup, so I'd like to hear what "good" looks like!

viccis2• 1 year ago

They push Serverless so hard but there are SO MANY limitations and surprise gotchas. It's driving me absolutely insane.

datadrivenangel4• 1 year ago

And it tends to be notably more expensive! 4-5x the price for less features...

hacliff• 1 year ago

Hey, what are the most painful limitations/gotchas you're hitting? I'm on this team and would like to hear about painpoints.

sh34r• 1 year ago

TBH it's really quite boring. You just have to go back in time to the late 2010s. They had an excellent Spark-as-a-Service product, at a time when you'd have better luck finding a leprechaun than a reliable self-hosted Spark instance in an enterprise environment. That was simply beyond the capabilities of most enterprise IT teams at the time. The first-party offerings from the hyperscalars were relatively spartan.

Databricks' proprietary notebook format that introduced subtle incompatibilities with Jupyter was infuriating embrace-extend-extinguish style bullshit, but on-prem cluster instability causing jobs to crash on a daily basis was way more infuriating, and at that time, enterprises were more than happy to pay a premium to accelerate analytics teams.

In the 2010s, Databricks had a solid billion-dollar business. But Spark-as-a-Service by itself was never going to be a unicorn idea. AWS EMR was the giant tortoise lurking in the background, slowly but surely closing the gap. The status quo couldn't hold, and who doesn't want to be a unicorn? So, they bloated the hell out of the product, drank that off-brand growth-hacker Kool-Aid, and started spewing some of the most incoherent buzz-word salad to ever come out of the Left Coast. Just slapping data, lake, and house onto the ends of everything, like it was baby oil at a Diddy Party.

Now, here we are in 2025, deep into the terminal decline of enshittification, and they're just rotting away, waiting for One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison to scoop them up and take them straight to Hell. The State of Florida, but for Big Data companies.

It would be a mystery to me too, why anyone would pick Databricks today for a greenfield project, but those enterprises from 5+ years ago are locked in hard now. They'll squeeze those whales and they'll shit money like a golden goose for a few more years, but their market share will steadily decrease over the next few years.

It's the cycle of life. Entropy always wins. Eventually the Grim Reaper Larry comes for us all. I wouldn't hate on them too hard. They had a pretty solid run.

presentation3• 1 year ago

Guess this is the beginning of the end of a great service, not holding my breath. Sounds like from the WSJ article that they’ll just become some AI agent backend service for Replit, and from the previous conversation on HN that Databricks ruins and shutters their acquisitions. Congrats on the big payout for the employees, though.

ahoka• 1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3VCYA1e-Q

spooky_action• 1 year ago

What's the relationship to replit?

presentation3• 1 year ago

I misread the WSJ article, it was just some generic comment from Replit; but still, I am not very optimistic about this.

whobre2• 1 year ago

A VC funded company that has never been profitable spending a billion on another startup…

alanfranz• 1 year ago

Databricks is profitable afaik.

whobre2• 1 year ago

https://www.wing.vc/content/comparing-the-financials-of-data...

Squarex3• 1 year ago

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

tudorg6• 1 year ago

[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 modifications to Postgres but do it completely at the storage layer, which is a distributed system in itself. This also brings some I/O performance opportunities.

While Xata has been around for a while, we're just launching this new platform, and it is in Private Beta. But we are happy to work with you if you are interested.

Btw, congrats to the Neon team!

atombender2• 1 year ago

Is this open source? A major point of Neon is that it's open source and self-hostable.

Hawxy2• 1 year ago

The PII masking aspect is very interesting and something we couldn't get when we decided on DBLab a month ago. What does the deployment model within AWS look like?

ajc232• 1 year ago

Neon also supports anonymization: https://neon.tech/docs/extensions/postgresql-anonymizer as well as schema only branching

Squarex3• 1 year ago

Do you support http or websocket connections like https://github.com/neondatabase/serverless? In my experience neon is ultra fast that way in serverless environments like 1-5ms per query with network roundtrip.

chime• 1 year ago

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.

horse6662• 1 year ago

Hi @tudorg - do the Xata copy-on-write branches work like Neon in that you effectively get an isolated Postgres cluster, allowing you to test roles, extensions, creating/dropping DBs, altering schema & data of existing DBs, etc? I looked in the docs but it wasn’t clear to me.

gniting2• 1 year ago

Give Prisma Postgres a shot? https://prisma.io/postgres (I work for Prisma)

Hawxy2• 1 year ago

If all you care about is the forking aspect we use DBLab Engine pretty effectively: https://postgres.ai/products/dblab_engine. Gets deployed within your own infrastructure.

1st1• 1 year ago

geldata.com

devoutsalsa• 1 year ago

I’ve had good experiences with Supabase.

vibhork2• 1 year ago

Supabase is your best bet.

pier25• 1 year ago

https://www.koyeb.com/docs/databases

timmg• 1 year ago

I remember the first post by the Neon team here on HN. I think I commented at the time that I thought it was a great idea. I’ve never had a need to use them yet, but thought I always would.

Cynically, am I the only one who takes pause because of an acquisition like this? It worries me that they will need to be more focused on the needs of their new owners, rather than their users. In theory, the needs should align — but I’m not sure it usually works out that way in practice.

kaeshiwaza• 1 year ago

Taking a pause also... I don't believe serving IA can be aligned to serving devs. I hope that the part of the work related to the core of PostgreSQL will help the community.

avinassh• 1 year ago

I remember the first post by the Neon team here on HN. I think I commented at the time that I thought it was a great idea.

Same! I remember it too. I found it quite fascinating. Separation of storage and compute was something new to me, and I was asking them about Pageserver [0]. I also asked for career advice on how to get into database development [1].

Two years later, I ended up working on very similar disaggregated storage at Turso database.

Congrats to the Neon team!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756671

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756510

higeorge13• 1 year ago

Congratz to neon team (i like what they built), but i don’t see the value or relation to databricks. I hope neon will continue as a standalone product, otherwise we lose a solid postgres provider from the market.

presentation3• 1 year ago

They claim they will in the FAQ… but we know how this usually goes

thayne• 1 year ago

If only companies were held liable for breaking promises they made when acquiring other companies

yencabulator4• 1 year ago

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

rockwotj• 1 year ago

Its pretty heavy in Azure, so I would be surprised if it went away. This is DBX play to move into the transactional database space in addition to the analytical database.

bootsmann• 1 year ago

The Databricks vs. Snowflake bidding war is probably an insanely good time to be a database startup.

bittermandel2• 1 year ago

Big congratulations!

I really do hope that their OSS strategy does not change due to this, as it's really friendly to people who want to learn their product and run smaller deployments. It's (intentionally or not) really hard to run at a big scale as the control plane is not open-source, which makes the model actually work.

acd10j• 1 year ago

Databricks is Oracle-level bad. They will definitely ruin Neon or make it expensive. In the medium to long term, I will start looking for Neon alternatives.

bradhe2• 1 year ago

Definitely agree, their M&A strategy is setup to strangle whoever they buy and they don't even know it. They're struggling in the face of Iceberg, DuckDB and the other tectonic shifts happening in the open source world. They are trying to innovate through acquisition, but can't quite make it because their culture kills the companies they buy.

I'm biased, I'm a big-data-tech refugee (ex-Snowflake) and am working on https://tower.dev right now, but we're definitely seeing the open source trend supported by Iceberg. It'll be really interesting to see how this plays out.

kjuulh3• 1 year ago

Congratulations to the Neon team.

To be honest this is a little sad for me. I'd hoped that Neon would be able to fill the vacuum left by CockroachDB going "business source"

Being bought by DataBricks makes Neon far less interesting to me. I simply don't trust such a large organisation that has previously had issues acquiring companies, to really care about what is pretty much the most important infrastructure I've got.

There certainly is enough demand for a more "modern" postgresql, but pretty much all of the direct alternatives are straying far from its roots. Whether it be pricing, compatibility, source available etc.

Back when I was looking at alternatives to postgres these were considered:

1. AWS RDS: We were already on AWS RDS, but it is expensive, and has scaling and operations issues

2. AWS Aurora: The one that ended up being recommended, solved some operations issues, but came with other niche downsides. Pretty much the same downsides as other wire compatible postgresql alternatives

3. CockroachDB: Was very interesting, wire compatible, but had deeper compatibility issues, was open source at the time, it didn't fit with our tooling

4. Neon: Was considered to be too immature at the time, but certainly interesting, looked to be able to solve most of our challenges, maybe except for some of the operations problems with postgresql, I didn't look deeper into it at the time

5. Yugabyte: interesting technology, had some of the same compatibility issues, but less that the others, as they're also using the query engine from postgresql as far as I can tell.

There are also various self hosting utilities for PostgreSQL I looked at, specifically CloudPG, but we didn't have the resources to maintain a stateful deployment of kubernetes and postgres ourselves. It would fulfill most of our requirements, but with extra maintenance burden, both for Kubernetes and PostgreSQL.

Hosting PostgreSQL by itself, didn't have mature enough replication and operations features by itself at that point. It is steadily maturing, but as we'd got many databases manual upgrades and patches would be very time consuming, as PostgreSQL has some not so nice upgrade quirks. You basically have to unload and reload all data during major upgrades. Unless you use extensions and other services to circumvent this issue.

phrotoma• 1 year ago

same downsides as other wire compatible postgresql alternatives

I'm interested if you'd care to elaborate.

kjuulh3• 1 year ago

Mainly in relation to notify/listen and advisory locks. Most of our code bases use advisory lock based migration tools. It would be a large lift moving to an alternative or building a migration scheduler out of process

tuukkah• 1 year ago

5. Yugabyte: interesting technology, had some of the same compatibility issues, but less that the others, as they're also using the query engine from postgresql as far as I can tell.

Neon is Postgres.

kjuulh3• 1 year ago

That is why I was hopeful for Neon unlike a lot of the other ones. Yugabyte however isn't just postgres.

gen220• 1 year ago

In my brief experience as an engineer (2014->), I've learned that the best "modern" alternative to PostgreSQL at year X has been PostgreSQL at year X+5. :)

davidgomes3• 1 year ago

Hey 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.

felixrydberg2• 1 year ago

Will there be a statement about the OSS nature of Neon?

tristan9572• 1 year ago

I'm also an engineer at Neon. The plan is to continue developing Neon as an Apache-2.0 licensed software.

joshstrange6• 1 year ago

That’s a nice FAQ and all but after what happened to bit.io [0] you have to understand why people (like me) are extremely worried about this.

We’ve all read glowing blog posts and reassuring FAQs enough times after an acquisition only to see a complete about-face a few months or a year later.

I quite enjoyed using Neon but as a solo founder running my business on Neon I can’t help but think it’s insanity to not be looking for alternatives.

Databricks is _not_ a company I trust at all.

[0] if you don’t know, databricks acquired bit.io and shut down all databases within 30 days. Production databases had <30 days to migrate.

jorams• 1 year ago

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.

ranguna2• 1 year ago

The FAQ, as meaningless as history as shown it is, is missing one key question: why?

yencabulator4• 1 year ago

That's the easiest to answer. Money.

breadwinner• 1 year ago

Love Neon, but that FAQ is worthless. Every company that gets acquired reassures customers that "nothing will change"... then it does, once the new company is in the acquirer's belly and gets digested.

rbanffy• 1 year ago

At first I thought it had something do to with arm64 SIMD instructions.

anshumankmr3• 1 year ago

What happens to existing customers of Neon?

joshstrange6• 1 year ago

Ask the bit.io customers….

Most likely a holding state for a bit before databricks ruins it or shuts it down. I started looking around when the news broke last week or so for alternatives.

anshumankmr3• 1 year ago

Any alternatives that you are aware of ? Most search results show me Supabase.

davidgomes3• 1 year ago

https://neon.tech/databricks-faq

mellosouls• 1 year ago

Previous discussion a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43899016

Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B (174 comments)

Robdel123• 1 year ago

I applied to neon last week and then the news broke about the acquisition. They rejected it this morning — I have never been happier to receive a rejection to an application.

This would’ve been three acquisitions straight for me and… I’m okay, they’re awful. I just want stability.

Congrats to the neon team! I use and love neon. Really hope this doesn’t change them too much.

tedivm• 1 year ago

I got hired at Kenna Security a month before they were acquired by Cisco and it was such a miserable experience that I won't work for any company the Kenna leadership are involved with, nor would I ever consider working at Cisco.

jhickok• 1 year ago

I've been through two now, and for one of them nothing much changed, and the other one I was basically lost in a stack of papers for a year. Can I ask what made the experience miserable for you?

no_wizard2• 1 year ago

Had personally the opposite experience. Acquisitions being one of the most interesting times to be hired into.

In a couple cases I’ve been recruited because I have a history of scaling and integrating acquisitions into companies successfully

Robdel123• 1 year ago

The first acquisition I was apart of wasn’t too bad! But we were still culturally very different. So after 2 years and properly transitioning things, I bounced to another start up.

Walking into something like that is tough because the two teams sort of don’t like each other and you’re really “neither”. I’d want to make sure I was interviewed by both teams

swyx3• 1 year ago

what if you had joined at neon's previous valuation (whatever it was) and got a sudden payday (assuming you had juuuust enough vesting)

Robdel123• 1 year ago

I was a very early employee at the other two start ups that were acquired and even with equity it was not worth it. After all the class A shares were paid out, the rest of us got little.

I mean, hindsight 20/20 here, but I would have loved the theoretical money @ 1 billion. But those are so rare and my experience in the past 15 years hasn’t matched those unicorns.

Basically I’ve come to the conclusion unless you have serious equity or you’re a founder, acquisition suck. You’re the one doing the work making these two companies come together, while the founders usually bounce or are stripped of any real power to change things.

gopalv• 1 year ago

Really hope this doesn’t change them too much.

My guess is that this team gets rolled into Online Tables tech, which would make product sense.

https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/machine-learning/feature-...

jamesblonde3• 1 year ago

Yes, that is what i expect, too. They have been paying DynamoDB and CosmosDB for a few years now. However, Neon is not competitive latency/throughput-wise for real-time workloads, needed for high end AI (like personalized recommendations). There are a few others I would have expected like Cockroach, Aerospike, or RonDB.

bicx• 1 year ago

I've been part of an acquisition as a first-year engineering manager, during which I had to navigate subsequent two rounds of layoffs. I was also a part of the group to help restructure teams and help make calls on who to keep. Morale was terrible, and the cultures also did not gel at all.

It led to some serious burnout and I took several months off. I'm now happily working as an IC again.

anentropic• 1 year ago

How do they know 80% of Neon databases are created by AI agents?

davidgomes3• 1 year ago

We can see which database creations are coming from products such as Replit, v0, Same.new, Create.xyz, and a few more etc.

Surely, there might be other agents creating Neon databases so we might be under-counting.

joshstrange6• 1 year ago

I’m incredibly disappointed by this news. I really enjoyed Neon but I seriously doubt I’m going to like Databricks’ stewardship if it. And that’s if they even still care about catering to people like me and don’t jack the prices us.

I guess it’s time to go back to the well of managed/serverless Postgres options…

vibhork2• 1 year ago

Supabase!

bradhe2• 1 year ago

Crazy how big the data ecosystem has grown. Congrats to the Neon team on a good outcome, but good luck integrating into DBX culture and surviving.

I'm seeing a lot of DBX hate in this thread overall. I think it's warranted. At Tower[0], we're trying to provide a decent open solution. It stars with owning your own data, and Iceberg helps you break free.

[0] https://tower.dev

foota2• 1 year ago

So... As someone who's joining databricks in a few weeks, what's with the hate in the comments?

datadrivenangel4• 1 year ago

It's big, enterprise, and competes aggressively on marketing and hype. Also there have been a string of acquisitions where databricks has kind of just absorbed the team and product and then not done a great job for customers of the old company.

It's fine. Probably actually a good place to work.

abxyz• 1 year ago

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).

jesseryoung• 1 year ago

Welcome to Databricks!

I've been an SA at Databricks for the past two years and love it here. The people you get to work with here are world-class and our customers legitimately love our product.

I too am a little confused about comments in threads on HN about Databricks, they seriously don't reflect what I see internally and what my customers say. I don't think I'd be working here if they did.

ranguna2• 1 year ago

Hopefully you weren't one of the SAs working on the bit.io migration after databricks acquired them.

foota2• 1 year ago

Thank you, I'm excited!

pradn• 1 year ago

Every company gets a ton of hate on Hacker News. Don't let it bother you too much. But the specific concerns may be a directional signal.

antruok5• 1 year ago

In my experience, one factor is databricks releasing features fast but unpolished.

I like how they’re innovating, but it can be rough around the edges sometimes.

jenny912• 1 year ago

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?

ko_pivot• 1 year ago

AWS Aurora Postgres Serverless v2 has that capability, though it takes multiple seconds.

ajc232• 1 year ago

[Neon employee] p99 for Neon compute start is 500ms

joshstrange6• 1 year ago

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.

aflukasz• 1 year ago

AWS Aurora Postgres Serverless v2 has that capability

Was just about to react to someone being wrong on the internet and say that this is not true. Instead, TIL that this is, in fact, the case. Since 2024Q4.

Thanks for invalidating my stale cache.

drewnick• 1 year ago

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.

jenny912• 1 year ago

I'm not afraid of running servers, that was not the point. The point was exactly that I wanted a serverless postgres.

If I can throw together a random project, completely isolated, that costs $0.10 per month, that enables me to do many orders more random projects than something that costs me $5 per month.

netvarun• 1 year ago

Does anyone have insight into Neon's financials - specifically their revenue, COGS, and gross margins? I'm trying to understand what made Databricks value them at $1B. Was it strong unit economics, rapid growth, or mostly strategic/tech value?

jlengrand• 1 year ago

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

barrrrald• 1 year ago

congrats to Nikita and all the wonderful folks at Neon!

jamesblonde3• 1 year ago

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. 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.

hlpn• 1 year ago

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.

anilshanbhag• 1 year ago

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.

lars_francke2• 1 year ago

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.

matt-p2• 1 year ago

What's wrong with minio out of curiosity? Ceph an option?

bittermandel2• 1 year ago

Wouldn't Rook be a good solution? It's definitely proven in much larger settings than Minio, as it's just Ceph.

SOLAR_FIELDS• 1 year ago

Don’t SeaweedFS and ceph/rook also offer this? Ceph/rook is definitely enterprise ready

pjdbruin• 1 year ago

Great to see cost-effective alternatives to Cloudera and Databricks! We’ve spent three years building IOMETE, a self-hosted data lakehouse that combines Apache Iceberg and Spark, designed to run natively on Kubernetes. We’re focused on on-premises deployments to address the growing need for data sovereignty and low TCO, with a streamlined setup for large-scale analytics. Early adopters are seeing strong results. Curious about your experience with Trino and Superset—any tips for optimizing performance at scale?

__turbobrew__• 1 year ago

On-premise open-source S3 is a problem though

Rook/ceph with object storage is pretty bulletproof: https://www.rook.io/docs/rook/v1.17/Storage-Configuration/Ob...

I do wish more systems had high quality operators out there. A lot of operators I have looked into are half baked, not reliable, or not supported.

kwillets• 1 year ago

It's been a commodity for decades now. Metrics like price-performance have a long history, but the SnowBricks products fail at them quite dramatically. The difference is hard-sell vs. soft or no-sell.

datadrivenangel4• 1 year ago

Not having to buy an appliance and pay for it up front is quite a valuable option. Also the split between processing and storage allows for better archival and scaling strategies.

datadrivenangel4• 1 year ago

But why would you buy an operational DB from Databricks? The only thing that makes sense is Databricks flailing to maintain market cap.

antruok5• 1 year ago

In addition to the AI use cases, sometimes you wanna share the data warehouse data in oltp way for fast lookups and high concurrency. Not sure whether Neon will do that but I hope so.

One example from Snowflake is hybrid tables which adds rowstore next to columnar.

OLAP + OLTP = HTAP

ako2• 1 year ago

ETL to bring all your data into Databricks/Snowflake is a lot of effort. Much better if your OLTP data already exists in Databricks and you directly access it from your OLAP layer.

swyx3• 1 year ago

if Databricks just wanted a row DB they couldve done postgres themselves. paying this much for Neon i think is a sign that Neon has something special they want (which, knowing their marketing line, is "independently scalable storage and compute for postgres")

dustingetz• 1 year ago

"Time is the denominator"

t0mas88• 1 year ago

That sounds like AWS Aurora?

yencabulator4• 1 year ago

Easy quick cheap forks of database state for AI agents to muck with.

richardw3• 1 year ago

Not commoditising for enterprise. My last gig wouldn’t allow open source software or any company that might not be there in a decade, or which kept data anywhere but our own tenant. We’d look for the “call us” pricing rather than hate it, which I normally do. We added databricks and it was considered one of my top three achievements, because they don’t have to think about data platforms again, just focus on using it. It’s SO expensive for an enterprise to rejig for a new platform that you can’t rely on (insert open source project here).

I managed to add one startup and so far it’s done very well, but it was an exceptional case and the global CEO wanted the functionality. But it used MongoDB and ops team didn’t have any skills, so rather than learn one tiny thing for an irrelevant data store they added cash to use Atlas with all the support and RBAC etc etc. They couldn’t use the default Azure firewall because they only know one firewall, so added one of those too. Also loaded with contracts. Kept hiring load down, one number to call, job done. Startups cost is $5-10k per year. Support BS about $40k. (I forget the exact numbers but it dwarfed the startup costs.)

Startups are from Venus, enterprise are from Jupiter.

antruok5• 1 year ago

Enterpise also often wants a full data platform (like Databricks), not a plain data warehouse.

adolph• 1 year ago

Not commoditising for enterprise. My last gig wouldn’t allow open source software or any company that might not be there in a decade, or which kept data anywhere but our own tenant.

Hence IBM talking up Iceberg: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/apache-iceberg

jeffbee• 1 year ago

My last gig wouldn’t allow open source software or any company that might not be there in a decade

I bet they had VMware all over the place.

jflkdsjlcsuq2• 1 year ago

I have been happily using ClickHouse for the past couple of years without any issue. Rock solid database with wide variety of features and fulfills all my needs. My favourite is the "external dictionary" feature which easily allows me to integrate it with other datastores like Postgres and Redis.

data_marsupial• 1 year ago

what do they use for ETL?

beoberha• 1 year ago

Congrats 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.

dan_goosewin3• 1 year ago

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.

bobxmax2• 1 year ago

Are people still making comments like these in 2025?

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

dan_goosewin3• 1 year ago

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.

amazingamazing2• 1 year ago

Not too familiar with Neon other than the basics - its premise is that you use S3 as bottomless storage for Postgres and it’s otherwise the same as standard Postgres right? And this is all open source? Why are people paying? Can’t you use a cloud provider and have them host this for you?

refset2• 1 year ago

you use S3 as bottomless storage for Postgres [...] Why are people paying?

It's vastly more complicated to do this efficiently than you might imagine. Postgres' internal architecture is built around a very different set of assumptions (pages, WAL, local disk etc.) than what the S3 API offers.

amazingamazing2• 1 year ago

I get that, but my understanding is that they opened sourced this itself, no?

aitchnyu• 1 year ago

Would "essential internal abstraction, with the introduction of read stream APIs" evolve into full storage abstraction?

https://pganalyze.com/blog/5mins-postgres-17-streaming-io

Icathian• 1 year ago

Hosting and operating the autoscaling of the various services (compute, pageserver, safekeeper, storage broker) that it takes to make all that work is complex enough that most folks would rather not. Same as any other "managed X" service.

yencabulator4• 1 year ago

Neon is only scale-to-zero from the point of view of the tenants; whoever runs the software, must keep nodes running, including triple-replicated WAL storage.

everfrustrated• 1 year ago

From the actual article

As Neon became GA last year, they noticed an interesting stat: 30% of the databases were created by AI agents, not humans. When they looked at their stats again recently, the number went from 30% to over 80%. That is, AI agents were creating 4 times more databases versus humans.

For me this has alarm bells all over it. Databricks is trying to pump postgres as some sort of AI solution. We do live in weird times.

4b11b4• 1 year ago

and how many of those DBs are still being actively used...

mehulashah• 1 year ago

I am excited to see Databricks turn into the next Oracle. This type of acquisition was inevitable. The king is dead! Long live the king!

And yes, congratulations to the Neon team! (Nikita is, after all, YC)

moonikakiss3• 1 year ago

This is really, really exciting. I see it as the “right” way OLTP and OLAP will converge.

The OP and I built an HTAP system at SingleStore. A single database with one copy of data for both OLTP and OLAP workloads. HTAP never took off [0].

What we learned was that OLTP (Postgres) should handle OLTP, while OLAP (data warehouses/lakes) should handle OLAP, with replication between them.

Designing the 'up-to-date' replication between these systems is hard.... columnar stores just aren’t built for OLTP‑style writes, and can't keep up with your OLTP tables.

Let’s see if Databricks and Neon can pull this off

“give me up‑to‑date Postgres tables in Unity Catalog", no debezium --> kafka --> flink --> Iceberg. With Spark jobs in the back ensuring that Iceberg is an optimal state.

https://www.mooncake.dev/blog/htap-is-dead

rajnathani• 1 year ago

By OP you mean Nikita Shamgunov the founder of Neon who also founded MemSQL (SingleStore) earlier, right?

orangechairs2• 1 year ago

How are Neon employees doing? Heard Neon laid off a few teams this week. That's fun. Anyone hear if their shares are worth anything in the acquisition?

whinvik• 1 year ago

I don't get this metric - 80% of databases are being created by AI agents. Is this because of tools like Lovable. Are they just creating databases when creating a website?

BohuTANG2• 1 year ago

Neon (open-source alternative to Aurora) is 73.6% Rust. Databend (open-source Snowflake alternative) is even more Rust-heavy at 97.2%.

Interesting trend - modern serverless databases choosing Rust for its memory safety, performance predictability. Makes sense for systems where reliability and efficiency are non-negotiable.

mdaniel• 1 year ago

Wow, go them! https://github.com/databendlabs/jepsen.meta#jepsenmetasrv

BohuTANG2• 1 year ago

Yes, Databend's metadata service (https://github.com/databendlabs/databend/tree/main/src/meta) also uses a Raft implementation written in Rust: https://github.com/databendlabs/openraft.

We've been running OpenRaft in production for several years now and have found it to be quite stable. It's designed as a generic, feature-complete Raft library that handles the complexities of distributed consensus well. If you're looking for a mature Rust Raft implementation, it's definitely worth considering.

xzhuang19842• 1 year ago

Congratulations to the Neon.

I believe that future data platforms will adopt an all-in-one approach, offering OLTP, OLAP, as well as support for other hybrid workloads such as vector, graph, and time series. This will lower user costs and be more friendly to applications in the AI era.

teleforce• 1 year ago

I believe that future data platforms will adopt an all-in-one approach, offering OLTP, OLAP, as well as support for other hybrid workloads such as vector, graph, and time series

It's already available and open source by the nice folks from MIT and they even wrote a book on it [1],[2].

You can use it to develop modern datahub for data engineering and analytics [3],[4].

[1] D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model:

https://d4m.mit.edu/

[2] Mathematics of Big Data: Spreadsheets, Databases, Matrices, and Graphs:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038393/mathematics-of-big-da...

[3] Technical Report: Developing a Working Data Hub:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00190

[4] Collaborative data analytics with DataHub:

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/100937

xzhuang19842• 1 year ago

Interesting! Thanks for sharing.

zombot• 1 year ago

When data bricks contain neon, do they glow in the dark?

aynyc• 1 year ago

I really like databricks at the beginning, Spark clusters magically appear whenever I needed them. No more thoughts were given on how to store the data, etc.. After a few years, I've grown, so did my skill set and my employer. Databricks simply couldn't grow with us at the rate that we needed. No, not because of scaling, but the toolings such as AI/ML, what the market is demanding us to do. Faster iterations and experiments, less cost.

Databricks now reminds me of Oracle. Still a great product, but it's a melting delicious ice cream.

crowcroft• 1 year ago

Someone deeper into the Databricks world correct me if this sounds like nonsense, but after thinking about this more my theory is that this is a defensive move for Databricks.

Smaller companies don't usually need Databricks until they grow and become larger with more complex needs, and enough data that queries start to take a long time to run.

As bare metal gets so much faster the point where you hit scaling issues with a DB becomes further and further away.

As this trend continues more companies might decide they don't need Databricks they just need a few Postgres replicas and nothing else.

Neon is kind of like an insurance policy against this outcome.

gopi• 1 year ago

Anyone considering Turso?

Databricks acquires Neon

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