Databricks, Snowflake deals put Postgres in the spotlight

In a notable shift within the database landscape, Snowflake has made headlines by acquiring Crunchy Data, a burgeoning Postgres database provider, during its recent conference. This announcement follows closely on the heels of Databricks’ significant investment of billion to purchase the Postgres startup, Neon. Such moves raise intriguing questions about the rising prominence of Postgres in the database ecosystem, especially as it has been recognized as the “most wanted” database in Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey for two consecutive years.

Neon, established in 2021 by Heikki Linnakangas and Stas Kelvich, positions itself as a “serverless open-source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres.” Its architecture is designed to decouple compute and storage, allowing for independent scaling with separate pricing. Databricks aims to leverage this acquisition to enhance its capabilities in the agentic AI database sector, noting that a significant portion—80%—of the databases provisioned on Neon’s platform were generated by AI agents.

On the other hand, Crunchy Data, founded in 2012, embarked on its journey with the ambition of becoming the premier Postgres vendor for security-focused organizations. The company has since honed its expertise in cloud-native Postgres solutions while committing to the use of 100% mainstream open-source software, steering clear of forks.

Snowflake has articulated that this acquisition will pave the way for the introduction of Snowflake Postgres, a novel iteration of Postgres tailored to support the most demanding, mission-critical AI and transactional systems at an enterprise scale. This strategic direction is poised to instill confidence among enterprises seeking robust database solutions.

“The strategic high-ground”?

Industry experts suggest that the acquisitions by both Databricks and Snowflake underscore a critical insight: the operational data store (OLTP) represents a strategic high ground, particularly in the context of AI. As one analyst noted, “Inference is the big market. That’s where everyone wants to go, and you need to have an operational data store to do that.” This perspective highlights the increasing importance of operational databases in harnessing the power of AI-driven applications and services.

Tech Optimizer
Databricks, Snowflake deals put Postgres in the spotlight