Crunchy Knowledge
Monday introduced the primary shock from Snowflake Summit 25: the acquisition of Crunchy Knowledge for a reported $250 million. Crunchy Knowledge is a longtime South Carolina firm that has been working and constructing upon the open supply Postgres database for properly over a decade, so what prompted the $70-billion information large to purchase it now?
When the cool children in IT have been going gaga for Hadoop and NoSQL databases again within the early 2010s, Paul Laurence, the president and co-founder of Crunchy Knowledge, had a special concept. Whereas these different applied sciences had their backers and successes, Laurence was targeted on one other rising pattern–one which additionally concerned enthusiasm for the potential for open supply, however with out all of the rule-breaking that Hadoop and NoSQL entailed.
“They have been betting on a brand new open-source information administration toolbox, the place they’d these NoSQL databases. That was a part of the place they have been going,” Laurence informed BigDATAwire in a July 2024 interview. “However in addition they noticed this as a chance to shift in the direction of open supply on the relational and SQL facet. They usually had evaluated the panorama and chosen Postgres as form of their massive wager.”
Laurence additionally determined to make a wager on Postgres in 2012, when he co-founded Crunchy Knowledge in Charleston, South Carolina together with his father, Bob. Through the years, the corporate launched a spread of Postgres-based choices, together with a supported distribution of the database known as Crunchy Postgres, a model of Postgres to run on Kubernetes containers, a cloud-hosted model known as Crunchy Bridge, and at last an analytics model known as Crunchy Bridge for Analytics.
By the point 2024 rolled round, Crunchy Knowledge had constructed a strong enterprise with 100 workers and 500 prospects. All of its merchandise are 100% suitable with Postgres, a assure that’s crucial for the corporate’s prospects in addition to the gasoline that drives the continued progress of Postgres. The wager on a boring piece of relational tech created by Michael Stonebraker 35 years in the past had paid off, which is a small miracle within the hype-driven echo chamber of IT.
Crunchy Knowledge President and co-founder Paul Laurence
“Postgres was largely dismissed once we first began. It was actually all about Hadoop and MongoDB,” Laurence informed us. “It was very contrarian on the time…People would say ‘You guys are loopy. What are you guys doing beginning a SQL database firm? SQL is lifeless. That’s not an actual factor anymore.’”
Snowflake Finds a Postgres
You wouldn’t mistake Snowflake for being an enormous fan of Hadoop or NoSQL, both. In actual fact, the corporate’s success is predicated in no small half on the wave of Hadoop failures within the late 2010s.
“I can’t discover a comfortable Hadoop buyer. It’s type of so simple as that,” Bob Muglia, the previous CEO of Snowflake, informed this publication again in March 2017. “It’s very clear to me, technologically, that it’s not the expertise base the world can be constructed on going ahead.”
Muglia, in fact, was proper: Hadoop would go on to implode in early June 2019, thereby paving the best way for the rise of cloud-based information warehouses and lakehouses, together with Snowflake. Simply over a 12 months later, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Snowflake famously went public because the “largest ever” software program IPO ever.
Since then, Snowflake has been in a neck-and-neck race with Databricks to develop the trade’s preeminent cloud information platform. Databricks, in fact, is the corporate behind Apache Spark, which additionally contributed to the decline of the Hadoop stack. Whereas Spark remains to be there, it’s simply part of what Databricks does anymore.
Like its rival, Snowflake has additionally been shifting away from the place it began. Whereas Snowflake has adopted newer analytics architectures for its RDMBS, together with MPP-style column retailer and separation of compute and storage, below the covers, Snowflake’s massive wager has been on conventional SQL and relational applied sciences.
Snowflake’s massive awakening below new CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy has been the significance of openness and a shift away from proprietary tech. That’s what drove it final 12 months to embrace Apache Iceberg, the open supply desk format that solved a bunch of the consistency points that arose with Hadoop’s buffet-style information entry patterns.
The assist for Iceberg tables as a substitute for Snowflake’s conventional tables additionally opened up the door for Snowflake prospects to carry an array of other question engines to bear on Snowflake information, together with open supply Trino, Presto, Dremio, Spark, and Apache Flink, amongst others.
Now with the acquisition of Crunchy Knowledge, Snowflake has a whole open supply database on provide. Snowflake Postgres, as the brand new providing is known as, brings prospects all of the open goodness of Postgres and its huge ecosystem.
So what modified? Why is Snowflake doing this now?
What Modified at Snowflake
What modified is agentic AI emerged on the scene, and Snowflake sensed that prospects wouldn’t be comfortable utilizing its proprietary relational Snowflake database to deal with this rising workload.
Whereas Snowflake’s database is highly effective and succesful, the corporate is just not about to open it up and permit prospects to change the database to deal with these rising agentic AI workloads in the identical method that they might with an open supply database–that they might with Postgres.
Snowflake EVP Christian Kleinerman addressed the explanations behind the acquisition of Crunchy Knowledge throughout a query and reply session with the press on Monday at Snowflake Summit 25.
(nikkimeel/Shutterstock)
“I feel at the beginning, it confirms our dedication to interoperability after which buyer selection,” Kleinerman mentioned. “I feel open supply is a bit of bit much less vital. However what issues with Postgres is just not whether or not it’s open supply or not. What issues is there’s a really giant group of those that worth Postgres constructed for Postgres, construct on prime of Postgres.
“That’s what drove us,” he continued. “That was the requirement for lots of the prospects and companions that we heard, which is we like loads of the expertise you construct, however it will make it method simpler for us to carry computation, to carry functions, to even carry brokers onto the info if in case you have one thing that’s Postgres suitable.”
In the case of interoperability and requirements, Postgres is king. Snowflake’s transfer reveals that prospects are prepared to place up with rather less efficiency in the event that they make it again with interoperability and requirements.
Snowflake appeared on the potential to construct a Postgres suitable layer on prime of its present database, however in the long run, it determined to purchase Crunchy Knowledge as an alternative.
“Clients and companions mentioned, please give me Postgres compatibility,” Kleinerman mentioned. “We requested one in all our absolute prime engineers, world class, prime 10, prime 20 on the planet in database design, can we layer the Postgres semantics and Postgres API on prime of our engine? And the reply was a really, very lengthy doc on why it gained’t work.
“And if prospects need compatibility with Snowflake, Snowflake is nice,” he continued. “What we did with Unistore and hybrid tables is nice. But when they need compatibility with Postgres, it’s not simply the syntax, the semantics and all of that. It needs to be Postgres. The one solution to obtain compatibility is with Postgres.”
By the best way, Databricks did the identical math, and determined to purchase Neon, a developer of a serverless Postgres database, for $1 billion.
Regardless of all of the progress in massive information, nothing apparently can beat SQL and relational tech.
Associated Objects:
Databricks Nabs Neon to Resolve AI Database Bottleneck
Snowflake Widens Analytics and AI Attain at Summit 25
Crunchy Knowledge Goes All-In With Postgres
