14 ms·

Databricks acquires Neon

389 points by davidgomes 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
anshumankmr 1y ago
What happens to existing customers of Neon?
- joshstrange 1y 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.
  - anshumankmr 1y ago
    Any alternatives that you are aware of ? Most search results show me Supabase.
    - joshstrange 1y ago
      Supabase is one that I'll consider, Xata [0] is another one that is interesting. Thankfully I just need "postgres", I don't need branching/PII-clearing/etc. That's all nice to have but I don't need it for my app. I really would prefer a managed DB for multiple reasons but I might need to look at just self-hosting. I might have spent less time futzing with my DB if I had done that from the start instead of going Aurora Serverless v1 -> Planetscale -> Neon. [0] https://xata.io/ https://xata.io/
      - anshumankmr 1y ago
        Same here...I too just need Postgres... Will check out Xata, My workload isn't super critical.
        gniting 1y ago
        Prisma Postgres is also an option to dig into: https://prisma.io/postgres https://prisma.io/postgres
      - plumeria 1y ago
        Branching is one of the most useful features of Neon.
        joshstrange 1y ago
        I believe that, it's a cool concept. But I was too nervous to build on top of that feature, I wanted to maintain my ability to leave Neon easily. After Planetscale (and using their version of schema branching) I didn't want to get pinched again when I went to switch (PS vs Neon branching was/is very different). I think one of the coolest features of neon is being able to quickly spin up new DBs via the API (single tenant DBs) and while that is cool, my client list is small so manually creating the DBs is not a problem (B2B).
- davidgomes 1y ago
  https://neon.tech/databricks-faq https://neon.tech/databricks-faq
lmc 1y ago
Neon's blogpost: https://neon.tech/blog/neon-and-databricks https://neon.tech/blog/neon-and-databricks WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/databricks-to-buy-startup-neon-for-1-billion-fdded971 https://www.wsj.com/articles/databricks-to-buy-startup-neon-...
flanked-evergl 1y 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 1y ago
  The market for IBM-like software and platforms (everyone else uses this! It must be good!) apparently wasn't saturated yet
- robertkoss 1y 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 1y ago
    I’d settle for only one bad name per feature from them. Alas, they don’t feel so limited
  - winwang 1y ago
    I'm building another Spark-based choice now with ParaQuery (GPU-accelerated Spark): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964505
- swalsh 1y 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 1y 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.
presentation 1y 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 1y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3VCYA1e-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3VCYA1e-Q
- spooky_action 1y ago
  What's the relationship to replit?
  - presentation 1y ago
    I misread the WSJ article, it was just some generic comment from Replit; but still, I am not very optimistic about this.
whobre 1y ago
A VC funded company that has never been profitable spending a billion on another startup…
- alanfranz 1y ago
  Databricks is profitable afaik.
  - whobre 1y ago
    https://www.wing.vc/content/comparing-the-financials-of-databricks-and-snowflake https://www.wing.vc/content/comparing-the-financials-of-data...
Squarex 1y ago
I’ve loved Neon and now I’m a little worried. Are there any alternatives?
- tudorg 1y ago
  [Disclaimer: I work for Xata] As it happens, we've just launched our new Xata platform (https://xata.io/ 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!
  - atombender 1y ago
    Is this open source? A major point of Neon is that it's open source and self-hostable.
    - tudorg 1y ago
      Several components are open source as their own projects (see below) which will allow you to reproduce most of the features on top of regular Postgres. But the storage part is not open source. We are considering a simpler implementation of it that would be realistic to self-host and still do copy-on-write branching. These are the open source components: * pgstream for the anonymization from the production branch * pgroll for schema changes * Xata Agent for the LLM-powered optimizations
      - atombender 1y ago
        I think when people look at Neon, the Aurora-style disaggregated compute/data architecture allowing highly scalable read replicas on cloud storage is the defining feature, and it's the only such project that offers it for Postgres. So the storage part is the point.
timmg 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756671 [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756510
higeorge13 1y 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.
- presentation 1y ago
  They claim they will in the FAQ… but we know how this usually goes
  - thayne 1y ago
    If only companies were held liable for breaking promises they made when acquiring other companies
  - yencabulator 1y ago
    https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- rockwotj 1y 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 1y ago
The Databricks vs. Snowflake bidding war is probably an insanely good time to be a database startup.
bittermandel 1y 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 1y 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.
- bradhe 1y 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 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.
kjuulh 1y 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 1y ago
  > same downsides as other wire compatible postgresql alternatives I'm interested if you'd care to elaborate.
  - 1y ago
davidgomes 1y 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 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.
- felixrydberg 1y ago
  Will there be a statement about the OSS nature of Neon?
  - tristan957 1y ago
    I'm also an engineer at Neon. The plan is to continue developing Neon as an Apache-2.0 licensed software.
- joshstrange 1y 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 1y 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.
rbanffy 1y ago
At first I thought it had something do to with arm64 SIMD instructions.
mellosouls 1y ago
Previous discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43899016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43899016 Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B (174 comments)
Robdel12 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- no_wizard 1y 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
  - Robdel12 1y 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
anentropic 1y ago
How do they know 80% of Neon databases are created by AI agents?
- davidgomes 1y 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.
joshstrange 1y 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…
- vibhork 1y ago
  Supabase!
bradhe 1y 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 https://tower.dev
foota 1y ago
So... As someone who's joining databricks in a few weeks, what's with the hate in the comments?
- datadrivenangel 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
  - ranguna 1y ago
    Hopefully you weren't one of the SAs working on the bit.io migration after databricks acquired them.
  - 1y ago
jenny91 1y 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 1y ago
  AWS Aurora Postgres Serverless v2 has that capability, though it takes multiple seconds.
  - ajc23 1y ago
    [Neon employee] p99 for Neon compute start is 500ms
    - jamesblonde 1y ago
      Yikes. No real-time ML with that.
      - stevelacy 1y ago
        If your project database is suspending for lack of requests I doubt a 500ms wake up delay is an issue.
  - joshstrange 1y 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 1y 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.
netvarun 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
congrats to Nikita and all the wonderful folks at Neon!
jamesblonde 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    Looking at StarRocks site (https://www.starrocks.io/ https://www.starrocks.io/), they compare against Clickhouse, Druid and Trino. Don't even compare against Spark/Databricks! Guess Spark is just not competitive.
    - jflkdsjlcsuq 1y ago
      Don't fall for benchmarketing. Do your own benchmarks for your use case.
- lars_francke 1y 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://stackable.tech/ & https://github.com/stackabletech/ 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.
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
beoberha 1y 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_goosewin 1y 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.
- bobxmax 1y ago
  Are people still making comments like these in 2025? What the hell do profits have to do with valuing tech startups?
  - dan_goosewin 1y 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.
    - bobxmax 1y ago
      No, it doesn't matter when you're paying $1B. Why would it? Tech companies don't care about profits. It's easy to become profitable - tech margins are obnoxiously high. They're bought and valued for their ability to scale and rapidly absorb market share.
      - dan_goosewin 1y ago
        Fair point. I submit that I'm probably overestimating how much profitability matters here. I've been hearing that Neon is burning through cash pretty aggressively, which raised eyebrows for me. But you're right: high margins and scalability mean profits can be deferred.
amazingamazing 1y 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?
- refset 1y 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.
  - amazingamazing 1y ago
    I get that, but my understanding is that they opened sourced this itself, no?
    - refset 1y ago
      It's not clear to me that the _entire_ Neon stack is OSS and available to self-host (though they do share a lot of OSS code, which is great), and in any case, it's not currently supported/documented beyond some "local development" instructions, e.g. "We do not officially support use of autoscaling externally" [0] > Can’t you use a cloud provider and have them host this for you? If it really is all OSS, then I guess the moat is the impressive execution of this team. [0] https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling
      - tristan957 1y ago
        The only component which is not currently open source is the control plane.
      - felixrydberg 1y ago
        There are some sections of the code that is close-source. Like the Console, but the devs are very active in their Discord. There is a small community trying to self-host, and from what I have seen gotten most of it working. There isn't an easy way to start it up for a more junior developer, but if you want to self-host it you are able to since all "components" are available
everfrustrated 1y 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 1y ago
  and how many of those DBs are still being actively used...
deleted 1y ago
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mehulashah 1y 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)
deleted 1y ago
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moonikakiss 1y 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 https://www.mooncake.dev/blog/htap-is-dead
- rajnathani 1y ago
  By OP you mean Nikita Shamgunov the founder of Neon who also founded MemSQL (SingleStore) earlier, right?
orangechairs 1y 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 1y 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?
BohuTANG 1y 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 1y ago
  Wow, go them! https://github.com/databendlabs/jepsen.meta#jepsenmetasrv https://github.com/databendlabs/jepsen.meta#jepsenmetasrv
  - BohuTANG 1y ago
    Yes, Databend's metadata service (https://github.com/databendlabs/databend/tree/main/src/meta https://github.com/databendlabs/databend/tree/main/src/meta) also uses a Raft implementation written in Rust: https://github.com/databendlabs/openraft 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.
xzhuang1984 1y 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 1y 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/ https://d4m.mit.edu/ [2] Mathematics of Big Data: Spreadsheets, Databases, Matrices, and Graphs: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038393/mathematics-of-big-data/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038393/mathematics-of-big-da... [3] Technical Report: Developing a Working Data Hub: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00190 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00190 [4] Collaborative data analytics with DataHub: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/100937 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/100937
  - xzhuang1984 1y ago
    Interesting! Thanks for sharing.
zombot 1y ago
When data bricks contain neon, do they glow in the dark?
aynyc 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
Anyone considering Turso?

389 points by davidgomes 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

anshumankmr 1y ago

What happens to existing customers of Neon?

joshstrange 1y 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.
- anshumankmr 1y ago
  Any alternatives that you are aware of ? Most search results show me Supabase.
  - joshstrange 1y ago
    Supabase is one that I'll consider, Xata [0] is another one that is interesting. Thankfully I just need "postgres", I don't need branching/PII-clearing/etc. That's all nice to have but I don't need it for my app. I really would prefer a managed DB for multiple reasons but I might need to look at just self-hosting. I might have spent less time futzing with my DB if I had done that from the start instead of going Aurora Serverless v1 -> Planetscale -> Neon. [0] https://xata.io/ https://xata.io/
    - anshumankmr 1y ago
      Same here...I too just need Postgres... Will check out Xata, My workload isn't super critical.
      - gniting 1y ago
        Prisma Postgres is also an option to dig into: https://prisma.io/postgres https://prisma.io/postgres
    - plumeria 1y ago
      Branching is one of the most useful features of Neon.
      - joshstrange 1y ago
        I believe that, it's a cool concept. But I was too nervous to build on top of that feature, I wanted to maintain my ability to leave Neon easily. After Planetscale (and using their version of schema branching) I didn't want to get pinched again when I went to switch (PS vs Neon branching was/is very different). I think one of the coolest features of neon is being able to quickly spin up new DBs via the API (single tenant DBs) and while that is cool, my client list is small so manually creating the DBs is not a problem (B2B).
davidgomes 1y ago
https://neon.tech/databricks-faq https://neon.tech/databricks-faq

lmc 1y ago

Neon's blogpost: https://neon.tech/blog/neon-and-databricks https://neon.tech/blog/neon-and-databricks WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/databricks-to-buy-startup-neon-for-1-billion-fdded971 https://www.wsj.com/articles/databricks-to-buy-startup-neon-...

flanked-evergl 1y 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 1y ago
The market for IBM-like software and platforms (everyone else uses this! It must be good!) apparently wasn't saturated yet
robertkoss 1y 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 1y ago
  I’d settle for only one bad name per feature from them. Alas, they don’t feel so limited
- winwang 1y ago
  I'm building another Spark-based choice now with ParaQuery (GPU-accelerated Spark): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964505
swalsh 1y 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 1y 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.

presentation 1y 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 1y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3VCYA1e-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3VCYA1e-Q
spooky_action 1y ago
What's the relationship to replit?
- presentation 1y ago
  I misread the WSJ article, it was just some generic comment from Replit; but still, I am not very optimistic about this.

whobre 1y ago

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

alanfranz 1y ago
Databricks is profitable afaik.
- whobre 1y ago
  https://www.wing.vc/content/comparing-the-financials-of-databricks-and-snowflake https://www.wing.vc/content/comparing-the-financials-of-data...

Squarex 1y ago

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

tudorg 1y ago
[Disclaimer: I work for Xata] As it happens, we've just launched our new Xata platform (https://xata.io/ 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!
- atombender 1y ago
  Is this open source? A major point of Neon is that it's open source and self-hostable.
  - tudorg 1y ago
    Several components are open source as their own projects (see below) which will allow you to reproduce most of the features on top of regular Postgres. But the storage part is not open source. We are considering a simpler implementation of it that would be realistic to self-host and still do copy-on-write branching. These are the open source components: * pgstream for the anonymization from the production branch * pgroll for schema changes * Xata Agent for the LLM-powered optimizations
    - atombender 1y ago
      I think when people look at Neon, the Aurora-style disaggregated compute/data architecture allowing highly scalable read replicas on cloud storage is the defining feature, and it's the only such project that offers it for Postgres. So the storage part is the point.

timmg 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756671 [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756510

higeorge13 1y 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.

presentation 1y ago
They claim they will in the FAQ… but we know how this usually goes
- thayne 1y ago
  If only companies were held liable for breaking promises they made when acquiring other companies
- yencabulator 1y ago
  https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
rockwotj 1y 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 1y ago

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

bittermandel 1y 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 1y 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.

bradhe 1y 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 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.

kjuulh 1y 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 1y ago
> same downsides as other wire compatible postgresql alternatives I'm interested if you'd care to elaborate.
- 1y ago

davidgomes 1y 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 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.

felixrydberg 1y ago
Will there be a statement about the OSS nature of Neon?
- tristan957 1y ago
  I'm also an engineer at Neon. The plan is to continue developing Neon as an Apache-2.0 licensed software.
joshstrange 1y 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 1y 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.

rbanffy 1y ago

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

mellosouls 1y ago

Previous discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43899016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43899016 Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B (174 comments)

Robdel12 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
no_wizard 1y 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
- Robdel12 1y 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

anentropic 1y ago

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

davidgomes 1y 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.

joshstrange 1y 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…

vibhork 1y ago
Supabase!

bradhe 1y 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 https://tower.dev

foota 1y ago

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

datadrivenangel 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
- ranguna 1y ago
  Hopefully you weren't one of the SAs working on the bit.io migration after databricks acquired them.
- 1y ago

jenny91 1y 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 1y ago
AWS Aurora Postgres Serverless v2 has that capability, though it takes multiple seconds.
- ajc23 1y ago
  [Neon employee] p99 for Neon compute start is 500ms
  - jamesblonde 1y ago
    Yikes. No real-time ML with that.
    - stevelacy 1y ago
      If your project database is suspending for lack of requests I doubt a 500ms wake up delay is an issue.
- joshstrange 1y 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 1y 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.

netvarun 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago

congrats to Nikita and all the wonderful folks at Neon!

jamesblonde 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  Looking at StarRocks site (https://www.starrocks.io/ https://www.starrocks.io/), they compare against Clickhouse, Druid and Trino. Don't even compare against Spark/Databricks! Guess Spark is just not competitive.
  - jflkdsjlcsuq 1y ago
    Don't fall for benchmarketing. Do your own benchmarks for your use case.
lars_francke 1y 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://stackable.tech/ & https://github.com/stackabletech/ 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.

curtisszmania 1y ago

[dead]

beoberha 1y 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_goosewin 1y 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.

bobxmax 1y ago
Are people still making comments like these in 2025? What the hell do profits have to do with valuing tech startups?
- dan_goosewin 1y 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.
  - bobxmax 1y ago
    No, it doesn't matter when you're paying $1B. Why would it? Tech companies don't care about profits. It's easy to become profitable - tech margins are obnoxiously high. They're bought and valued for their ability to scale and rapidly absorb market share.
    - dan_goosewin 1y ago
      Fair point. I submit that I'm probably overestimating how much profitability matters here. I've been hearing that Neon is burning through cash pretty aggressively, which raised eyebrows for me. But you're right: high margins and scalability mean profits can be deferred.

amazingamazing 1y 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?

refset 1y 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.
- amazingamazing 1y ago
  I get that, but my understanding is that they opened sourced this itself, no?
  - refset 1y ago
    It's not clear to me that the _entire_ Neon stack is OSS and available to self-host (though they do share a lot of OSS code, which is great), and in any case, it's not currently supported/documented beyond some "local development" instructions, e.g. "We do not officially support use of autoscaling externally" [0] > Can’t you use a cloud provider and have them host this for you? If it really is all OSS, then I guess the moat is the impressive execution of this team. [0] https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling
    - tristan957 1y ago
      The only component which is not currently open source is the control plane.
    - felixrydberg 1y ago
      There are some sections of the code that is close-source. Like the Console, but the devs are very active in their Discord. There is a small community trying to self-host, and from what I have seen gotten most of it working. There isn't an easy way to start it up for a more junior developer, but if you want to self-host it you are able to since all "components" are available

everfrustrated 1y 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 1y ago
and how many of those DBs are still being actively used...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mehulashah 1y 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)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

moonikakiss 1y 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 https://www.mooncake.dev/blog/htap-is-dead

rajnathani 1y ago
By OP you mean Nikita Shamgunov the founder of Neon who also founded MemSQL (SingleStore) earlier, right?

orangechairs 1y 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 1y 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?

BohuTANG 1y 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 1y ago
Wow, go them! https://github.com/databendlabs/jepsen.meta#jepsenmetasrv https://github.com/databendlabs/jepsen.meta#jepsenmetasrv
- BohuTANG 1y ago
  Yes, Databend's metadata service (https://github.com/databendlabs/databend/tree/main/src/meta https://github.com/databendlabs/databend/tree/main/src/meta) also uses a Raft implementation written in Rust: https://github.com/databendlabs/openraft 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.

xzhuang1984 1y 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 1y 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/ https://d4m.mit.edu/ [2] Mathematics of Big Data: Spreadsheets, Databases, Matrices, and Graphs: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038393/mathematics-of-big-data/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038393/mathematics-of-big-da... [3] Technical Report: Developing a Working Data Hub: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00190 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00190 [4] Collaborative data analytics with DataHub: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/100937 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/100937
- xzhuang1984 1y ago
  Interesting! Thanks for sharing.

zombot 1y ago

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

aynyc 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago

Anyone considering Turso?