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The open-source PostgreSQL (typically additionally known as Postgres) is seemingly a extremely popular commodity for giant enterprise knowledge platform distributors.
Snowflake is buying privately-held PostgreSQL supplier Crunchy Information, in a deal that’s reportedly valued at $250 million. The acquisition comes barely two weeks after Snowflake’s rival Databricks acquired serverless PostgreSQL vendor Neon. The pair of PostgreSQL acquisitions highlights the important significance of the open-source database to trendy enterprise knowledge and AI workflows.
Not like Neon, which was solely a three-year-old firm, Crunchy Information has been round for over a decade, having been based in 2012. The corporate’s core platform, Crunchy Postgres, is a managed, automated and totally supported model of PostgreSQL. There’s additionally a selected model of the platform for Kubernetes environments and a more recent product referred to as Crunchy Information Warehouse that brings the platform to knowledge lakehouse environments.
In accordance with Snowflake, Crunchy Information’s expertise would be the basis of a brand new providing often known as Snowflake Postgres. It should permit customers to mix Crunchy Information’s enterprise-grade and developer-friendly Postgres capabilities inside Snowflake’s safe and ruled perimeter. The aim is to simplify how builders construct, deploy and scale production-ready AI brokers and apps.
“In our discussions, it rapidly grew to become clear that the identical traits that Crunchy Information was seeing from the operational database world had been additionally obvious to Snowflake,” Paul Laurence, co-founder of Crunchy Information wrote in a weblog submit. “With immediately’s announcement, we’re concentrating on the massive on-line transactional processing (OLTP) market, leveraging Snowflake’s attain and Crunchy Information’s versatile, scalable options for enterprise workloads and builders alike.
What PostgreSQL help brings to Snowflake
Snowflake has its personal knowledge cloud platform that gives a cloud knowledge warehouse for its enterprise prospects.
Whereas Snowflake has a rising buyer base, it’s not the identical because the open-source PostgreSQL neighborhood. PostgreSQL has emerged to grow to be a very talked-about database, not only for conventional enterprise functions but in addition for agentic AI. In spite of everything, that’s why Databricks acquired Neon.
It additionally brings in a stable developer neighborhood. Information analyst Sanjeev Mohan informed VentureBeat that in his view, this is a superb acquisition.
“Not like Neon, Crunchy is actually enterprise,” Mohan mentioned.
He added that Crunchy Information has a really deep PostgreSQL neighborhood of customers and it’s additionally engaged with Kubernetes. Crunchy Information isn’t simply centered on PostgreSQL for operational workloads; it’s additionally in a position to help analytics as properly. PostgreSQL by default was initially simply an OLTP (On-line Transaction Processing) database, nevertheless it has been expanded by Crunchy Information in addition to different distributors like Google with its AlloyDB, to additionally help OLAP (On-line Analytics Processing) database workloads.
Mohan is total extraordinarily optimistic on the continued prospect of PostgreSQL for enterprise use circumstances.
“The neighborhood has repeatedly added distinctive capabilities not just for conventional relational and SQL use circumstances but in addition for time-series, JSON and vector search, whereas boasting a number of the finest geospatial options accessible,” he mentioned.
Why PostgreSQL issues to the Snowflake and its enterprise customers
PostgreSQL is broadly used within the enterprise. However maybe much more importantly, builders more and more use it as a basis for agentic AI. That is one other key cause why Databricks acquired Neon and why Snowflake is now buying Crunchy Information.
It’s all a part of a broader multi-year effort at Snowflake to have interaction with builders in an open manner.
“The recognition of PostgreSQL with builders, coupled with CrunchyData’s help for knowledge warehousing on Iceberg, align properly with Snowflake’s core technique,” Kevin Petrie, vp of analysis at BARC informed VentureBeat.
Apache Iceberg is an open-source knowledge lake desk format that Snowflake helps as a part of the corporate’s rising methods to embrace extra open applied sciences. Petrie famous that it’s not too arduous to think about how corporations would use CrunchyData expertise throughout the Snowflake platform to construct AI functions for frequent use circumstances reminiscent of telemetry, geospatial and commercial analytics.
He’s additionally not too stunned that Crunchy Information is being acquired.
“Crunchy Information’s development appears to have flattened within the final couple of years, so it’s not shocking to see them go for this exit,” Petrie mentioned. “The consolidation wave amongst knowledge instruments and platforms continues.”
Why it issues to the enterprise
For enterprise knowledge and AI leaders, Snowflake’s acquisition of Crunchy Information reinforces a key level that will have already been apparent to some: PostgreSQL issues.
PostgreSQL is now not simply an open-source different to proprietary relational databases. It’s an open, broadly used platform that’s quickly changing into a de facto customary for builders and the enterprises they work for to construct agentic AI and enterprise functions at scale.
The large hyperscalers, together with Google, Amazon and Microsoft, in addition to a protracted listing of smaller distributors together with EDB, Aiven and Netapp Instaclustr are all already supporting PostgreSQL.
Now, with Snowflake and Databricks throwing their help and lots of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} at PostgreSQL, it’s clear that enterprises ought to have it as a part of their developer and AI stacks.
