Comment by buremba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buremba | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

Crunchy is the company with more in depth technical knowledge of Postgres.

A couple of core Postgres members work there and iirc also the guy who spearheaded Heroku Postgres.

> literally name themselves as "Postgresql Data Warehouse" but correct me if I'm wrong

That's not their primary product. Crunchy Postgres is their primary offering and they recently announced Crunchy Data Warehouse.

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?

1) built using an open source kubernetes operator, as I understand 2) Crunchy provides true superuser access and access to physical backups – that's huge

Why is that huge out of interest?

Business continuity. If you don't have access to your backups, there's nothing you can do to work around a vendor issue.

Sounds like Stackgres?

Neon acquisition was ~$1B.

We don't know that Snowflake didn't miss out on neon - seems plausible (and silly for neon to not run an acquisition by Snowflake)

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