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Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M
- neonate 1y agohttps://archive.md/59bYY https://archive.md/59bYY
- chachra 1y agoBummer that all the postgres serverless providers are getting acquired. First Neon, now this. Hope the innovation and competitive pricing continues!
- redwood 1y agoThere's still Xata. And plenty of other options that support a Postgres compatible API like CockroachDB and Yugabyte. The problem is there's so much sprawl in this postgres ecosystem that it seems like no one other than the hyperscalers is really able to reach a escape velocity...
- tristan957 1y agoYugabyte is Postgres from my understanding. They recently rebased from 12 to 15, I think.
- redwood 1y agoI thought they were slowly closing the car in terms of capabilities
- AnnaPali 1y agoSounds like time to build up a new postgres serverless company and get acquihired/exited!
- dmurray 1y agoIf everyone in this sector is getting lucrative acquisitions, that should encourage more copycats.
- throwaway314155 1y agoI feel like the history of anti-trust regulation in America has something to say about that...
- mediaman 1y agoThat only works if there are moats that discourage new entrants (e.g., buying a social media upstart works because of the network effect). Not obvious serverless postgres is in that category.
- thomasjudge 1y agothere's only so many buyers
- candiddevmike 1y ago> Part of the reason Snowflake and Databricks are interested in database companies is because PostgreSQL can serve as the underlying database for customers to create AI agents with data they store in the companies’ respective platforms. I don't understand this part. What does PostgreSQL offer here that these vendors believe they can't add to their existing platform? Is it the ecosystem?
- gk1 1y agoLow-latency and cheap retrieval for RAG.
- FridgeSeal 1y agoBut why do they need serverless Postgres for that? They could achieve the same with normal pg, or SQLite. Or any number of other embedded DB’s. There’s also plenty of disaggregated compute options available…
- redwood 1y agoI imagine they are buying the expertise in managing the transactional system rather than the IP itself. Operationally running a transactional system is a different ballgame for these OLAP players. (of course what they're not getting is scale readiness.. it's not like these companies have anything resembling RDS level customer workloads)
- steveBK123 1y agoI read this as "buying potential competitors off the market" right? Less ability for customers to roll-their-own => more customers for Snowflake?
- FridgeSeal 1y agoWith neon being bought by databricks, serverless Postgres tech has effectively disappeared from the market.
- film42 1y agoCongrats to the Crunchy Data team! Thanks for making containerized postgres so easy for years and years. Wish you all the best!
- kwillets 1y agoSnowflake is becoming the Juicero of data.
- markus_zhang 1y agoAs a DE, I have an unpopular disdain of Snowflake because it trivalize a lot of stuffs. I think I'm going to switch to OLTP given the chance.
- gigatexal 1y agoCan you go into more depth on this?
- FridgeSeal 1y agoRight there with you. Developed my disdain after having to put up with the incredibly shitty behaviour from the sales and account teams a few years ago. Sure they had some novelty years ago, but everyone and their dog has disaggregated compute these days, and all their other “feature” just feel like enterprise money extraction that they’ve acquihired in. Expensive, slow, and painful.
- smohare 1y ago[dead]
- 9283409232 1y agoIf you're using Snowflake as an OLTP you're looking at the wrong technology anyway.
- 9283409232 1y agoIf you can afford it, I have a hard time coming up with reasons to not use Snowflake.
- skeeter2020 1y agoOne good reason is that a huge population of companies just don't have enough data to justify Snowflake. We sell a product built on it, and I wish we'd had DuckDB 3-4 years ago; it's perfect for 95%+ of our clients
- pella 1y agogithub repo : https://github.com/crunchydata https://github.com/crunchydata
- fredthestair 1y agoSnowflake sounds like nominative determinism. I was just looking at this thing today, totally puzzled as to how to update it and postgres itself without rolling dice that it destroys everything on the cluster that uses postgres. Perhaps someone with k8s experience could explain to me why CRDs are not Singleton hell? The LLMs just run me in circles..
- antibios 1y agoI run a two service cluster in the home lab for fun. I use PVC mapped to a NFS share for the actual data so you could always run a local postgres binary against it. In a production environment I would map these to local disk partitions like you would normally do for a db. The upgrade process is actually quite nice when it works but it is "another" thing to learn and troubleshoot. I think of CRDs as a troubleshooting flowchart that someone with more experience than me has put together. When it's right it's great and when it's wrong it makes trouble shooting harder. That is until you remember that the whole point of k8s is ephemeral containers. When one breaks just delete it and let pgcluster CRD resync the data.
- debarshri 1y agoI think $250M is fairly low. Must be a good deal for snowflake.
- open592 1y agoWith Neon going to Databricks, the pool of potential buyers dramatically shrank.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoThat's such a wild way to view this. I see this the opposite way: the pool of incredibly awesome fantastic postgres technology companies who are uniquely top of the game was down to very very very few. The musical chairs here is who can get such long proven incredible fantastic well knowing talent. Who can snarf it up & convince these incredible doers to fold into the amorphous indistinct corporate giant.
- achristmascarl 1y agoI wonder what accounts for the gap between this and Neon's $1B price tag. Is the deal structured less favorably for Neon? Does Neon have significantly more revenue? Seems like Neon raised a lot more venture funding, too.
- debarshri 1y agoValue is an intriguing concept. They may not have the revenue to justify their value or maybe they have. The price tag could be the result of an amazing negotiation or could be genuine forward-looking features they had. You will never know.
- politelemon 1y agoThey'll earn that much back from anyone doing just a few gigs of data egress transfers.
- jrochkind1 1y agoany guesses as to whether existing products will remain?
- buremba 1y agoIt's interesting that Snowflake went shopping for Crunchy Data over Neon. While Neon focused on bringing compute and storage separation to OLTP, Crunchy Data focused more on bringing OLTP/PostgreSQL closer to OLAP with DuckDB and Iceberg. In a way, Crunch Data was a competitor to Snowflake as they literally name themselves as "Postgresql Data Warehouse" but correct me if I'm wrong. Neon sounds more complementary to Snowflake as they were struggling with an OLTP backend, namely their Unistore product, which was announced 3 years ago but never went into general availability due to its scalability issues. Maybe Neon was 4x more expensive, but this acquisition sounds more like an answer to Databricks than a strategic acquisition if I'm being honest. Apparently, Crunchy had $30M ARR, so it's 8x ARR, which is a cheaper answer to Databricks.
- compton93 1y ago> literally name themselves as "Postgresql Data Warehouse" but correct me if I'm wrong That's not their primary product. Crunchy Postgres is their primary offering and they recently announced Crunchy Data Warehouse.
- buremba 1y agoI thought Crunchy Data Warehouse was their main product, looking at most of their marketing posts. What's the advantage of using their managed PostgreSQL offering on the cloud, compared to native offerings such as AWS RDS and GCP Cloud SQL?
- samokhvalov 1y ago1) built using an open source kubernetes operator, as I understand 2) Crunchy provides true superuser access and access to physical backups – that's huge
- anonymousDan 1y agoWhy is that huge out of interest?
- cmcconomy 1y agoI had them mixed up with Citus and was confused since I thought they already belonged to MS!
- glenngillen 1y agoWas a cross-over of a number of team members with both product. An easy thing to be confused by.
- merillecuz56 1y ago[dead]
- SJC_Hacker 1y agoI honestly have no idea what these companies do that makes them so valuable. I guess you have to be pretty close to C level at a big company to even understand.
- cpard 1y agoThere are a couple different reasons that make this acquisition interesting. First is their long pursuit of HTAP and the failures around unistore. Snowflake wanted to get into transactional workloads for a long time and for good reasons. I wonder what will happen to Unistore after this acquisition. The other interesting part is ETL/ELT, CDC and the whole business of replicating transactional databases into OLAP. What crunchy built with duckdb and iceberg is a potential solution to this problem. A problem that has been painful to solve for a long long time. Being able to replicate your transactional database into your data lake or data warehouse without having to deal with Debezium and all the rest of the stuff, is going to make many data teams happy.
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]