Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

[codeflo]

I haven't heard of either of those companies. I don't even fully understand what Databricks does. But it's clear that they have no problem shutting down a production database offering with 30 days notice, and have the gall to title this action "Investing in the Developer Experience". If this doesn't send a message that you shouldn't trust them with anything important, I don't know what would.

[qsort]

> what Databricks does

It's an ancient African word that means "I am because I can't install Apache Spark".

[rovr138]

Databricks is a company by the people that built Spark.

They've extended and their platform does a lot now.

[kccqzy]

Wow you are right. The blog post doesn't even mention it but the home page https://bit.io/ does.

[lucideer]

Slight oversimplification but Apache Spark is basically the "open core" to Databricks' commercial platform.

[debarshri]

It probably was an acqui-hire. If the product was growing at a VC investible rate, they wouldn't have sunset-ed the product. Alternatively, may be they are going rebrand it into something that aligns with databricks.

[relativ575]

> But it's clear that they have no problem shutting down a production database offering with 30 days notice

Maybe there is no production db left from paying customers?

[re-thc]

> I don't even fully understand what Databricks does

The naming is really confusing. When I brick my console it's broken. I'm not sure I want to brick my data :(

[coolgoose]

Going to beat a dead horse, but 30 days to migrate your database over ? I hope nobody was seriously using it in production, otherwise it's going to be a fun month for them.

[tmountain]

Putting business critical data on a mom and pop service called bit.io was the first mistake.

[gibolt]

The real concern is for those who don't get the memo until day 31

[thewataccount]

> Then, final database exports will be available for download through July 29.

Hope nobody was using bit.io as a set and forget solution...

Which I thought was the entire point of the cloud hosted databases?

[ibejoeb]

> Your databases will continue to work through June 29.

This is crazy. 30 days to migrate? Hope nobody is taking a holiday in the next couple of weeks.

[neilv]

Is it effectively Databricks that is shutting down an infrastructure solution on short notice?

I'm not thinking about whatever legal technicalities could be debated by lawyers, but what real-world truth is.

[paulddraper]

You thought correctly.

[inssein]

Damn, 30 days is quick. I found out about https://neon.tech but then quickly ran into a major bug, and then thankfully found out about bit.io, which is what I use for https://dittoed.app.

Looks like I will have to go back to neon (they fixed the bug).

If anyone has other ideas, I'm all ears. Project is hosted on Cloudflare and they have D1 now, but Dittoed uses a little bit of PostGIS.

[singpolyma3]

Have you tried supabase?

[5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV]

Neon sounds good for you. I'd wager any kind of managed database is fine, so the question is if you enjoy the features/cost savings Neon brings. Otherwise I cannot recommend using a managed DB enough because that's the best 20 bucks you're gonna spend.

[ako]

AWS RDS, AWS Aurora or Retool database?

[LispSporks22]

We’ve been moving our workflows out of Databricks to PostgreSQL to save a ton. Wonder if what they’re going to do with this would have been handy at the time.

[soulbadguy]

Where is the saving coming from if i may ask ? Are you guys using Databricks offerings or a self managed spark cluster ?

[lisasays]

Anything you'd be missing about Spark from doing so?

Would like to know more about the cost tradeoffs, also. Please elaborate.

[dimfeld]

Corresponding statement from bit.io here: https://blog.bit.io/whats-next-for-bit-io-joining-databricks...

[itsrobforreal]

2 months ago they had a blog post titled "bit.io’s new pricing Always available. Guaranteed performance. No surprises."

Surprise!

[beoberha]

I wonder how much money is enough to give the middle finger to all your customers? Really disappointing to see.

[thenipper]

That's a bummer, I really liked using bit.io for little experiments. That being said i never paid for it so i can't really complain.

[stumblers]

same, I'm a paying customer and liked it. I don't have 'production' level demands but was doing lots of prototyping and testing of ideas. Very easy to use and reliable enough to count on.

Stinky.

[wferrell]

Enjoyed using bit.io. Excited to see what Adam, Jmo and crew do at databricks.

Was easy to export my dbs from bit.io -- did so this morning.

[running101]

Get ready for your bill to go through the roof.

[barefeg]

Are there alternatives to the database service with similar API or is it leaving a gap in the market?

[tuukkah]

Neon is an awesome serverless Postgres: https://neon.tech/

[brightball]

I don't know about serverless, but it's hard to beat Crunchydata for PostgreSQL these days. They're my goto.

[eevo]

Render's offering is really good. Backups, read replica, many common extensions included. Fairly cheap. https://render.com/docs/databases

[pistoriusp]

[disclosure: I'm the founder of Snaplet]

I think there are a lot of different reasons why people may want to use a service like bit.io, but if you want a database with data in it to code against, run tests against, reproduce production related data-bugs, and run e2e tests against then check out https://www.snaplet.dev.

[ed25519FUUU]

Amazon serverless Postgres aurora.

[gdubya]

This is interesting... possibly a move by Databricks to try and build on their "data lakehouse" concept to counter the recent "Fabric platform" announcements at MS Build.

Databricks coined the "Delta lake" concept and are still (just about) leading the way, but Fabric has the potential from MS to take away that marketshare. Databricks need to improve their "serverless SQL" offering, and add a serious "data warehouse" component alongside the lake.

[Scubabear68]

Of all the stupid tech terms in the world, for some reason “data lakehouse” grates horribly in my head every time I hear it.

[vforgione]

Fabric may eat some of the descriptive analytics portion of Databricks’ lunch, but for core data engineering workflows there is nothing in the Fabric—or Synapse or Power BI—ecosystem that comes close.

There are other fatal flaws to the Spark implementation in Synapse that I think carried over to Fabric. Worst one is the clunkiness/inability to run multiple notebooks concurrently on a cluster.

[itsrobforreal]

I'm perusing the Fabric docs and they are using Delta Lake, Spark and Azure Databricks as part of that solution

[tapsboy]

This might be a play against Snowflake Unistore (https://www.snowflake.com/blog/introducing-unistore/)

[snapcaster]

What benefits does one get from using bit.io or other equivalents compared to the AWS built in Aurora? is their offering different and I'm just confused by the jargon?

[cccybernetic]

It takes < 10 seconds to go from no account to database w/ bit.io

[unnouinceput]

"Serverless"...this word is so thrown around nowadays that it lost its original meaning. Same way the phrase "we're like a family" transitioned from a beloved one in 50's to its thrown away in 90's meaningless all the way to today be considered a red flag when you hear such a word at a hiring interview, the "serverless" word is in its late 90's nowadays. One decade and will become just another red flag.

[mborch]

The meaning is pretty clear: you don't manage compute, it scales up elastically based on demand, even all the way to zero. Ideally, it reacts quickly enough to changes in demand that you don't need to worry about it. Serverless is basically the original promise of the cloud.

[thinkharderdev]

What was the original meaning? When I hear "serverless" I think basically:

1. I don't have to think about or manage any servers

2. Usage is metered at a very fine-grained level (per X requests to the API/per GB of data/etc)

3. No fixed cost. You only pay for usage.

Was there a different meaning originally?

[fdasvklaj432]

well i for one am very happy i never found out about bit.io, which looks amazing and is something i would have used instead of fly.io unmanaged postgres.

[newjersey]

Disclaimer: I was a non paying user and used it just to try out some code in dotnet entity framework and postgresql (at $work I only ever get to touch sql server but for hobby projects I thought it would be nice to do something that doesn't require paying Microsoft).

Bit io is awesome. It just works. I mean so does elephant but bitio has more storage. I never got very far with my learning and never did tadvanced db concepts like cross apply though so it was just simple entities and tables but it worked just fine and the best part, no credit card required on file.

Fly sounds nice but I don't feel so good about having to give them my credit card number...

[tracker1]

Been playing with CockroachLabs (CockroachDB Cloud) as a cloud db platform, and relatively happy with my testing so far. It isn't completely pg compatible, and do wish they'd expose a web based query interface with better connection pooling characteristics.

That said, mostly PG compatible data types, indexes and queries, horizontally scalable with pay for what you use, free and reserved tiers.

[candiddevmike]

Is this an acqui-hire?

[monero-xmr]

Assume any acquisition without public terms done over blog post is an acqui-hire. But given the market that's still an accomplishment!

[lern_too_spel]

bit.io is shutting down its service and telling all its customers to find a new solution, so very likely, yes. https://bit.io/

[moneywoes]

How was bit.io different from say supabase

[rovr138]

It's an actual database.

[eatonphil]

Congrats to Adam and the bit.io team!

[thewataccount]

I don't mean to take away from getting hired at databricks.

But my understanding is they essentially got hired at Databricks? Maybe got a paycheck to do it?

Meanwhile they shuttered and abandoned the product and all customers.

Is it really the goal to make an mvp and plan to get noticed and acquired vs actually making a product, customers can migrate in a month or not we don't care?

The product they made was literally meant to be a reliable solution. 1 month for all customers to migrate away? Really? That's assuming they see the announcement today too, it would be so easy to miss the email/hacker news post.

[pedrobtz]

Is there a class of problems where Databricks Spark might be the best perf/cost solution?

[unixhero]

Aha consolidation in the space

I think I've seen this before

[xiaodai]

i might have been the only person using bit.io and saw the potential there. applied for a job but got rejected. meh

[tadhunt]

Congrats Adam, Jmo & team!

[colesantiago]

a great and incredible journey it has been.