15 ms·
Microsoft acquires Citus Data (YC S11)
- jarym 8y agoWell this is great news for the guys at Citus - they created something great as a Postgres add-on and a big chunk of it was open sourced. They made a decent cloud business model out of it (no idea how successful but everyone I asked was happy with it). I just hope Microsoft allow the tech to evolve as open source!
- iKevinShah 8y ago"I just hope Microsoft allow the tech to evolve as open source!" Current Microsoft sure will. They're good with open source stuff.
- craigkerstiens 8y agoIn case folks are interested here are the details from our founders on the Citus blog - https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2019/01/24/microsoft-acquires-citus-data/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2019/01/24/microsoft-acquires...
- reacharavindh 8y agoSo, a part of Microsoft will advocate for SQL server, and another part will develop for PostgreSQL? Isn't it weird? Why would Microsoft want this?
- brokensegue 8y agofor azure?
- rockker 8y agoIt is all about choice. As both AWS and Azure user, I can attest that Microsoft is doing a lot more with OSS and contributing than AWS. We are both a SQL Server and PostgreSQL shop and are excited about this move by Microsoft and Citus.
- the_common_man 8y agoSame thing as Oracle owning MySQL. Keep your friends close but enemies closer.
- adventured 8y agoFor a similar business reason as to why Azure offers Linux, Microsoft develops for Android and iPhone and Oracle owns MySQL. Microsoft doesn't regard PostgreSQL as a direct threat to SQL Server and it's happy to make money where it can so long as it doesn't perceive something to be a mortal threat.
- rockker 8y agoThat is what I am observing too.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- giancarlostoro 8y agoAzure gives you Linux and Windows as options for hosting, because money is money and engineers are not free.
- jerrysievert 8y agohosted postgres is already available on azure, ala rds.
- 8y ago
- iKevinShah 8y agoWhat are the odds that Citus's Enterprise is released to community version like Github's private repos in near future?
- AlexB138 8y agoI wonder how long it will be before they shutdown their own Citus Cloud hosted offering, which is hosted on AWS. Seems obvious that will become part of Azure soon.
- btown 8y agoI doubt they'd disrupt their AWS operations right away - this certainly won't be the first time that a MSFT team/subsidiary has used AWS. What's more worrying to me is if they try to do both - build out a Citus offering on Azure, and simultaneously try to keep high-reliability of their AWS Citus Cloud, which may be the most reliable option for some time. It's tough for any organization, no matter how much capital has been injected, to keep a laser-sharp eye on two inevitably-competing initiatives, each of which have their own performance and automation characteristics. I don't want the one person in the company who knows, say, cloud hard drive recovery patterns like the back of their hand and had previously been the EBS guru, to suddenly be pulled into the new Azure optimization project... and that's not something that capital injections can necessarily fix. That said, this could accelerate their development timelines overall, and it guarantees stability for the product for quite a while. Overall I think this is good news! Citus is one of those things that you want to have in your back pocket when building any type of app on Postgres, and we certainly see it in our company as a long-term "escape hatch" when we're forced to make database-heavy design decisions at currently relatively-small scale. This deal keeps it alive and prospering!
- kod 8y agoGreat news, their product is awesome and this will hopefully let more people use it. Knowing that Citus is available as an option if you need to scale makes Postgres that much more compelling of a default choice for data store.
- lcfcjs2 8y agoAnd that was the last time we heard the name "Postgres".
- elvinyung 8y agoAzure Cloud Spanner time?
- tosh 8y agoGreat news for Citus, Microsoft, Postgres and for people using open source relational databases. This makes so much sense. (I know this comment might read naive to some but I’m genuinely excited right now)
- tracker1 8y agoI'm pretty excited as well... Especially if this means improvements to Azure's PostgreSQL options. DBaaS is one of the areas where cloud providers give a LOT of value, more so as long as the interfaces you use can be used internally/locally for development. Similarly, I really appreciate MS-SQL for Linux on Docker as it is a lot easier to setup for CI/CD and local for dev and testing and is nearly transparent going to Azure SQL or MS SQL Enterprise for hosted deployments. I'd much rather use PostgreSQL with PLv8 than MS-SQL though.
- brightball 8y agoWhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!? Is this a move to defend SQL Server or expand Azure’s PG offering?
- rockker 8y agoI think SQL is a huge business for them already. This looks like for Azure and OSS and expanding there.
- jchristopherinc 8y agoHappy for the folks at Citus. I use Citus at work and it's amazing. Hope things stays the same after the acquisition.
- jaxn 8y agoMy sentiments as well. Great team to work with and really like the product.
- gist 8y agoOn that page appears that the photo is a composite and mashed together from various sources. And not a good job either.
- ninju 8y agoYeah...looks like only the first, and maybe the second, guy was really on the stairwell. All the other people appear to be photoshopped in :-)
- talawahdotnet 8y agoA little off topic, but I wonder how long it will be before MS acquires Docker Inc. Seems like an even better fit for them now that they own GitHub. GitHub + Docker Hub on the developer engagement side and Docker Enterprise on the traditional enterprise side.
- gaius 8y agoDocker the company is a lame duck, and docker the software is being rapidly supplanted by podman and buildah. There would be no point.
- barbecue_sauce 8y agoI'm wondering how much the OCI and CRI-O has impacted Docker's value proposition. Docker Hub seems more and more like the real product, though I guess you could argue that the container runtime was never really a product in the first place.
- talawahdotnet 8y agoPrivate repos on Docker Hub is definitely a product, especially if you provide a seamless path for moving from source code on GitHub to images on Docker Hub to containers deployed in the cloud or on premise. MS could certainly also do good business selling Docker's friendly Enterprise orchestration tools (including their new Kubernetes based tool) which check all the Enterprise requirements for security, policy, identity management etc.
- taormina 8y agoSo, how much did YC make?
- manigandham 8y agoCitus is already used by Microsoft itself internally, a recent example being the VeniceDB project to analyze Windows telemetry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeMaBwd90SI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeMaBwd90SI Considering the competitive database landscape, this is a compelling offering to add to any cloud portfolio. Congrats to the Citus team.
- skunkworker 8y agoI still can't get over the fact that Microsoft is using Postgres internally, if you had told me that 5 years ago I wouldn't have believed it. Did they go into why over MSSQL?
- manigandham 8y agoMSSQL currently does not have horizontal sharding capabilities like this, or easy UPSERT functionality.
- plasma 8y agoI've dabbled with SQL Data Warehouse (via Azure); wouldn't this be the horizontal functionality? It has some limitations, but curious how it compares to Citus.
- manigandham 8y agoYes but that's a different product designed with columnstores and still missing the upsert. This use-case was for lots of telemetry data that had high updates and very selective queries using indexes rather than large aggregations. Scale-out OLTP was better suited for these analytics than a normal OLAP system.
- plasma 8y agoThank you makes sense
- cdbattags 8y agoIn the latest world of Postgres: - we now have closed source Amazon Aurora infrastructure that boasts performance gains that might never see it back upstream (who knows if it's just hardware or software or what behind the scenes here) - we now have Amazon DocumentDB that is a closed source MongoDB-like scripting interface with Postgres under the hood - lastly, with this news, looks like Microsoft is now doubling down on the same strategy to build out infrastructure and _possibly_ closed source "forked" wins on top of the beautiful open source world that is Postgres Please, please, please let's be sure to upstream! I love the cloud but when I go to "snapshot" and "restore" my PG DB I want a little transparency how y'all are doing this. Same with DocumentDB; I'd love an article of how they are using JSONB indices at this supposed scale! Not trying to throw shade; just raising my eyebrows a little.
- timClicks 8y agoI get what you're saying, but BSD-licenses are specifically designed to facilitate things not being sent upstream. I don't understand why people moan about companies complying with the license agreement.
- cdbattags 8y agoYour argument is legal and my argument is moral =P
- ymistykwim 8y agoyour moral assertion isn’t an argument, because it contradicts the license chosen by the relevant people
- cat199 8y agoSo, castrating independent economic activity and forcing people to be subservient based on other activities is 'moral'? this argument cuts both ways.
- ABeeSea 8y agoIf the creators of Postgres wanted all improvements to be upstreamed, they wouldn’t have released under a permissive license. The ability to use Postgres commercially without exposing your entire codebase to copyleft risk is one of the reasons it’s used commercially in the first place.
- lonk 8y agoNext achievement is selling the operating system to Micros~1
- yingw787 8y agoCongratulations to the Citus Data team! I don't have anything significant to add, but I loved the free socks you gave out :)
- mmsimanga 8y agoI haven't used Citus but once thought about Cstore_fdw. How much of this is about Cstore_fdw? I am curious because in data warehousing space my experience has been column store databases totally rule when it comes to speed on analytics. I know SQL Server has column store indexes but that requires you to create them whereas with genuine column store you get the performance boost by virtue of how data is stored.
- massaman_yams 8y agoVery little, I'm guessing; cstore_fdw is not remotely competitive with mature analytics DBMS. see here: https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html
- mmsimanga 8y agoGreat link, thanks for sharing.
- olavgg 8y agoFor data analytics I use ClickHouse instead of PostgreSQL. There is a PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW) for the ClickHouse database, but I have never used it.
- manigandham 8y agoSQL Server indexes can be either clustered or non-clustered, which determines whether table data is stored by index order. If you have a clustered columnstore index then the table is actually physically stored in a column-oriented format. Combined with vectorized processing, an impressive query optimizer, and in-memory tables, MSSQL is one of the fastest OLAP systems available. Also Cstore_fdw is rather obsolete and more of an experiment. It's a rough wrapper around ORC files and is missing many features, advancements and an execution engine to match the performance and usability of a real OLAP database.
- Robin_Message 8y agoAny stats/articles on SQL server having an impressive query optimizer? I have personally found it almost entirely devoid of ability but maybe we just had awkward queries.
- jbverschoor 8y agocrap :(
- pritambarhate 8y agoThe main question is: Did MS want an expert PgSQL team to work on Azure PostgreSQL (and may to create a proprietary competitor to Aurora)? Or Did they acquire Citus for its product, to improve and market it further? It feels like it was the first. If so, it means bad news for Citus product as it will most likely be ignored for a while. That will be really sad, as I don't know any actively supported automated sharding solution for PgSQL other than Citus. There is PostgresXL[1], but there isn't much focus to make it community friendly. [1]: https://www.postgres-xl.org/overview/ https://www.postgres-xl.org/overview/
- scarface74 8y agoThis is more of a competitor to Redshift than Aurora.
- teej 8y agoCitus improves the performance of OLAP query loads but it's not an analytics solution first. They say so themselves - https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2018/06/07/what-is-citus-good-for/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2018/06/07/what-is-citus-good... --- When we first started building Citus, we began on the OLAP side. As time has gone on Citus has evolved to have full transactional support, first when targeting a single shard, and now fully distributed across your Citus database cluster. Today, we find most who use the Citus database do so for either: (OLTP) Fully transactional database powering their system of record or system of engagement (often multi-tenant) (HTAP) For providing real-time insights directly to internal or external users across large amounts of data.
- mjw1007 8y agoI don't think anyone should expect acquihiring an expert Postgres team to work on a proprietary product to work well, because the programmers' skills are eminently transferrable. Half the team would probably wander off to work for one of the other postgres-centered companies (and quite possibly continue to work on the open source Citus code).
- 8y ago
- areohbe 8y agoCongrats Citus team. Just please keep the blog alive! Craig's post are some of my favorite Postgres reads.
- coverband 8y agoCongrats to folks at Citus -- they've matured quickly to reach this point in just a couple of years.
- CSDude 8y agoGreat news for another Turkish company acquistion, I wonder what was the acquisition price.
- ksec 8y agoThat means PostgreSQL will hopefully get more resources development upstream.
- diminish 8y agoDoes anyone know any details about the financials of the deal? Is this an acquihire or more?
- simonw 8y agoThere's no way this was just an acquire: Citus represents some truly impressive computer science.
- andrewstuart 8y agoImpressive computer science does not at all correlate with commercial success. If anything, that makes it more likely to be an acquihire.
- yahyaheee 8y agoThis is awesome, congrats. Any chance you all may change the license to something more permissive? :fingers crossed:
- Smerity 8y agoThe big news here: Citus Data donated 1% of their equity to non-profit PostgreSQL organizations[1] so this acquisition is a win for the community even in the darkest scenario of Citus Data disappearing into a canyon on the Microsoft campus. Given Microsoft's change in operation over recent years there's also hope that they can continue their contributions into the future. It's fascinating to see Microsoft leave behind the "embrace, extend, extinguish" narrative only to have Amazon adopt it, causing massive rifts and action within the database community[2][3]. I am genuinely concerned about the future of open source software in this continued scenario. An article with what I considered an outrageous headline ("Is Amazon 'strip mining' open source?"[4]) has only rung more true over time. Amazon is one of the largest companies on earth, selling products that they receive for free but never improve[5], attacking the primary open source provider, and then shift toward their comparable proprietary closed offerings. Hopefully new ways to "give back", such as equity contribution, can be one of the many paths forward needed to keep open source software healthy. Given how much innovation is unlocked by this, it'd be a crime to go back to the past era. [1]: https://www.citusdata.com/newsroom/press/citus-data-donates-1-percent-equity-to-non-profit-postgresql-organizations/ https://www.citusdata.com/newsroom/press/citus-data-donates-... [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/30/aws-is-competing-with-its-customers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/30/aws-is-competing-with-its-cu... [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-middle-finger/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-... [4]: https://www.cbronline.com/analysis/aws-managed-kafka https://www.cbronline.com/analysis/aws-managed-kafka [5]: From [2], "Jay Kreps, a creator of Kafka and co-founder and CEO of Confluent ... said Amazon has not contributed a single line of code to the Apache Kafka open-source software and is not reselling Confluent’s cloud tool."
- jonathannorris 8y agoCongrats to the Citus Team! Really a great group of people over there.
- sam0x17 8y agoMaybe now they will actually add a free tier so people can sign up for this, develop their product using a free tier, and upgrade when they launch, as is the natural progression with most other cloud products. I think before there were some complexity and/or financial issues preventing this but with Microsoft's wallet it shouldn't be an issue.
- aidos 8y agoThere’s a community version.
- sam0x17 8y agoThat doesn't really help. What I want is a seamless service I can just spin up an SQL server on with some cheap or free plan and tiny capacity, and then have it horizontally scale based on usage without me ever having to do or change anything, potentially to the point where it's dealing with terabytes and terabytes of data, thousands of connections, a large monthly bill, etc. Google's Cloud Spanner was supposed to be this, but the minimum monthly fee is $90ish which makes it impractical for anyone who doesn't want to waste money while developing. Citus has traditionally turned up its nose on HN at users who don't already have a massive database, but you gotta start somewhere, and the product is a lot better if you can stay in the same DB ecosystem from 0 users to 1,000,000 users and beyond. e.g. something like the free "tiny turtle" plan here: https://www.elephantsql.com/plans.html https://www.elephantsql.com/plans.html, but that can auto-scale up to citus-scale things, without user intervention, as needed.
- aidos 8y agoIt’s a very unsettling future we’ve ended up in where I see that Citus has been purchased and I’m pleased in was by Microsoft.
- peterwwillis 8y agoIt's going to be really funny if Microsoft ends up using Open Source software to compete against its proprietary service-based competitors. Sort of like how GCP runs k8s... you can use the free tool, or you can use the managed service, and the community helps build the thing. In theory, you retain competitive advantage because you have the most expertise in the product. The Googles of the world lose out on professional services, but Microsoft could still make a bundle of money by just consulting on the tools without even managing them. You might even make higher margins by not managing the service.
- gfody 8y agoI hope this means tPostgres or pgtsql gets some Microsoft resources!
- Apaec 8y agoWhy is an acquisition a win for the company? Seems to me like the big company is killing the small one and absorbing its soul(brand). Shouldn't sustainability be the primary goal instead of making big bucks temporarily?
- oarabbus_ 8y agoSpeaking as a data professional and SQL addict, I was always impressed when I came across Citus Data posts. Good acquisition by Microsoft.
- gigatexal 8y agoI wonder if the Citus folks will have any influence on the future of SQLSERVER. Maybe they’ll bring a plug-in system to it?
- grumpydba 8y agoIf microsoft invests significantly in plsql support and oracle compatibility they can bleed Oracle bug time.
- irisiert 8y agoThe photomontage is pathetically bad...
- akerro 8y agogenuine question: Why people think this is good, but MySQL acquisition by Oracle was bad? Both companies have internal conflict of interest by already owning close-source SQL servers, both companies have history of attacking opensource communities.
- detaro 8y agoI wouldn't say it is "good", but two reasons why it probably isn't so bad: Citus is a company active in Postgres, it's not "the Postgres company" like MySQL AB was. Their business model seems like it fits to what Microsoft is doing now, so the open-source part is hopefully not in real danger.