Databricks and Neon

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.

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.

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.

Maybe unrelated but Databricks is the most annoying garbage I have ever had to use. It fascinates me how anyone uses it by choice.

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.

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.

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.

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

Neon's blogpost: https://neon.tech/blog/neon-and-databricks

WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/databricks-to-buy-startup-neon-...

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

We're really excited about this, and will try to respond to some of the questions people have here later.

> 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.

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.