[HN Gopher] Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M
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Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 67 points
Date : 2025-06-02 20:01 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| chachra wrote:
| Bummer that all the postgres serverless providers are getting
| acquired. First Neon, now this. Hope the innovation and
| competitive pricing continues!
| redwood wrote:
| There'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 wrote:
| Yugabyte is Postgres from my understanding. They recent
| rebased from 12 to 15, I think.
| AnnaPali wrote:
| Sounds like time to build up a new postgres serverless company
| and get acquihired/exited!
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/59bYY
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Low-latency and cheap retrieval for RAG.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| But 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I read this as "buying potential competitors off the market"
| right?
|
| Less ability for customers to roll-their-own => more customers
| for Snowflake?
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| With neon being bought by databricks, serverless Postgres
| tech has effectively disappeared from the market.
| fsckboy wrote:
| is it open source? (this?
| https://github.com/neondatabase/neon.git ) and since it's
| serverless, in terms of being on the internet what are you
| saying has disappeared, a proprietary version?
| support/consulting contracts?
| tristan957 wrote:
| What do you mean by this? Neon is still operating the same
| service.
|
| Source: I work there.
| znpy wrote:
| I think it's the large ecosystem of BSD licensed stuff they can
| fork and relicense as proprietary software.m, because the BSD
| license allows that.
| brightball wrote:
| Crunchydata is an excellent vendor and a purist in the
| ecosystem. The Crunchydata Warehouse product was also extremely
| compelling.
|
| It's probably worth it just for their people.
| film42 wrote:
| Congrats to the Crunchy Data team! Thanks for making
| containerized postgres so easy for years and years. Wish you all
| the best!
| kwillets wrote:
| Snowflake is becoming the Juicero of data.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| Can you go into more depth on this?
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Right 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.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| If you're using Snowflake as an OLTP you're looking at the
| wrong technology anyway.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| If you can afford it, I have a hard time coming up with reasons
| to not use Snowflake.
| pella wrote:
| github repo : https://github.com/crunchydata
| fredthestair wrote:
| Snowflake 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I think $250M is fairly low. Must be a good deal for snowflake.
| open592 wrote:
| With Neon going to Databricks, the pool of potential buyers
| dramatically shrank.
| achristmascarl wrote:
| I 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| any guesses as to whether existing products will remain?
| buremba wrote:
| It'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 it's 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, they had $30M ARR, so it's 8x ARR,
| which is a cheaper answer to Databricks.
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