Datadog acquires Quickwit
15 comments
·January 9, 2025Hixon10
It's a bit sad that many modern databases were recently acquired. They had the potential to bring a lot of innovations.
oliverrice
(disclaimer: supabase employee)
OrioleDB continues to be a fully open source and liberally licensed. We're working with the OrioleDB team to provide an initial distribution channel so they can focus on the storage engine vs hosting + providing lots of user feedback/bug reports. Our shared goal is to advance OrioleDB until it becomes the go-to storage engine for Postgres, both on Supabase and everywhere else.
Happy to hear any concerns you have
chrisweekly
Please forgive and help remedy my ignorance: it's a coherent goal to want OrioleDB to be the go-to storage engine for Postgres, on Supabase?
gnabgib
Related:
Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit (228 points, 6 months ago, 195 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701
Show HN: Quickwit – OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog (145 points, 1 year ago, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042
slt2021
* note to myself: build a successful product that threatens large slow moving legacy provider and get quickly acqui-hired
bk146
Curious what Datadog is going to build with this tech. Believe this company pitching themselves as OSS competitor to Datadog a few months ago.
slt2021
arguably they acquired them so they dont build anything further with this tech, as it threatens renewals of their existing enterprise contracts
politelemon
A larger bill for enterprise customers.
okbro
Based on the [press release](https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-quickwit/) it looks like they're hinting towards offering a 'self-hosted' model for customers that can't use pure SaaS solutions due to regulations:
> Organizations in financial services, insurance, healthcare, and other regulated industries must meet stringent data residency, privacy, and regulatory requirements while maintaining full visibility into their systems. This becomes challenging when logs need to remain at rest in customers’ environments or specific regions, hindering teams’ ability to attain seamless observability and insight. To help our customers meet these requirements without sacrificing visibility or introducing multiple logging tools, we are pleased to announce that Quickwit—a popular open source distributed search engine—is joining Datadog.
spamizbad
We switched from Datadog to Grafana (do not recommend unless they got you over a barrel on pricing and you need to escape) and one nice thing Grafana gives you is the ability to self-host for local development so you can even run integration tests against your observability... an edge case need but if you need it you're glad it has it.
everfrustrated
>it looks like they're hinting towards offering a 'self-hosted' model
That makes sense. Datadog has been pure SaaS the whole time, which is unusual. Buying a good db engine like Quickwit would be a smart head-start into the on-prem segment which is a natural expansion opportunity.
I've previously made the prediction that Datadog is the new Cisco - can expect lots of acquisitions to be made going forward.
everfrustrated
Pretty clear they want it to keep a moat on their side. Can't see Datadog continuing investing in this - it's a pretty direct competitor.
What happened to Vector the last opensource they bought? Are they still hired?
winrid
I could only imagine they want to replace their existing infra with this as a potential cost saving measure.
andrewstuart2
And then I'm sure they'll pass the savings onto customers given the current crazy high prices.
Well, it looks like Quickwit was going to add an Enterprise license as of earlier this year (PR #5529), which I had been keeping eyes on, but this announcement says they're instead going to relicense as Apache 2.0 so the "community can continue on":
> We will be focused on building a new product with Datadog, and to ensure our open-source community can continue, we will soon release a major update of both Quickwit with a relicense to Apache License 2.0 and tantivy.
So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down? It has been pretty nice and stable in my experience, so I can't really complain much. But I was really looking forward to what else it could bring.
Congrats to the team, in any case!