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?
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…
(of course what they're not getting is scale readiness.. it's not like these companies have anything resembling RDS level customer workloads)
Less ability for customers to roll-their-own => more customers for Snowflake?
Source: I work there.
Evidently, I was very wrong, which I’m glad to hear tbh.
It’s probably worth it just for their people.
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.
In that case BigQuery is more managed than both, PAYG for analytical queries without thinking about compute nor clusters whatsoever.
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.
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.
Seems like Neon raised a lot more venture funding, too.
You will never know.
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.
That's not their primary product. Crunchy Postgres is their primary offering and they recently announced Crunchy Data Warehouse.
A couple of core Postgres members work there and iirc also the guy who spearheaded Heroku Postgres.
I guess you have to be pretty close to C level at a big company to even understand.
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.
chachra•8mo ago
redwood•8mo ago
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•8mo ago
redwood•8mo ago
AnnaPali•8mo ago
dmurray•8mo ago
throwaway314155•8mo ago
mediaman•8mo ago
Not obvious serverless postgres is in that category.
thomasjudge•8mo ago