Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

I 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?

With neon being bought by databricks, serverless Postgres tech has effectively disappeared from the market.

Crunchy has some really smart people working there. Maybe most notably Tom Lane. I wonder if he'll stay on after the acquisition.

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…

Yugabyte is Postgres from my understanding. They recently rebased from 12 to 15, I think.

there's only so many buyers

I feel like the history of anti-trust regulation in America has something to say about that...

That'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.

Value 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.

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.

Can you go into more depth on this?

If you're using Snowflake as an OLTP you're looking at the wrong technology anyway.

One 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

Just for the data sharing feature alone it's worth using. It's so damn easy to onboard and maintain data sources when they have a Snowflake share. You don't have to worry each day about loading processes randomly failing and you don't have to write any custom logic to hit APIs and properly flatten and merge responses into the database.

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.