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> 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?



I read this as "buying potential competitors off the market" right?

Less ability for customers to roll-their-own => more customers for Snowflake?


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


What do you mean by this? Neon is still operating the same service.

Source: I work there.


Oh my bad! I was under the (evidently mistaken) impression that since they were bought by databricks they would just become a part of that and cease to be.

Evidently, I was very wrong, which I’m glad to hear tbh.


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?


There is also this one from Supabase: https://www.orioledb.com/


Prisma Postgres is a nice choice if you're looking for serverless postgres.


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.


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


Low-latency and cheap retrieval for RAG.


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…


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)


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.




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