Snowflake has followed rival Databricks in snapping up a young Postgres database provider – announcing that it was buying “Crunchy Data” at its recent conference, three weeks after Databricks laid down $1 billion for Postgres startup “Neon”. Is that a sign that Postgres is taking over the database landscape? It’s certainly been the “most wanted” database in Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey for the second year running.
Neon, founded by Heikki Linnakangas and Stas Kelvich in 2021, describes itself as a “serverless open-source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres.” It decouples compute and storage and prices them separately for independent scaling. Databricks is targeting the agentic AI database space with the acquisition, it said. (Neon, founded in 2021, claims that 80% of the databases provisioned on its service were created by AI agents.)
Crunchy Data, founded in 2012, said it “launched with a goal to become the leading Postgres vendor for security-conscious organizations.” It has gone on to focus on cloud-native Postgres and promises to always use 100% mainstream open-source rather than Postgres forks. Snowflake said the deal will “allow us to deliver Snowflake Postgres, a new kind of Postgres designed to power the most demanding, mission-critical AI and transactional systems at enterprise scale and with enterprise confidence.”
“The strategic high-ground”?
“I think the moves by both Databricks and Snowflake, validate one thing: That OLTP or the operational data store is the strategic high ground, especially for AI… Inference is the big market. That's where everyone wants to go, and you need to have an operational data store to do that."
