Snowflake has hoovered up Crunchy Data, plugging what was an increasingly visible gap in the cloud data giant’s Postgres strategy.
Snowflake had previously offered a PostGres connector to suck data into its SQL-based engine.
However, suddenly everyone seems to think it’s important to pump up their Postgres portfolio, not least as the database is the most popular amongst developers, according to Stack Overflow.
Last month Snowflake arch rival Databricks snapped up Neon in a $1bn deal, saying it would allow it to deliver serverless Postgres.
At the time, Databricks said that 80 percent of the databases provisioned by Neon were “created automatically by AI agents rather than by humans.”
Snowflake sprung the acquisition as it kicked off its Summiy 25 user event in San Francisco. Reports put the cost of the deal at $250m.
Crunchy’s Postgres technology will be immediately repackaged as Snowflake Postgres, which the soon to be new owner pitched as “the AI-ready, enterprise-grade and developer-friendly PostgreSQL database to the AI Data Cloud.”
Snowflake described this as “a new kind of Postgres designed to power the most demanding, mission-critical AI and transactional systems at enterprise scale and with enterprise confidence.”
Connecting up silos
It would maintain the “full power and flexibility of open source Postgres” it said, while delivering the governance and security a giant like Snowflake can offer.
More tangibly, Snowflake said the rebadged product would eliminate admin and operational silos.
And, it said, “Companies deeply invested in the Postgres ecosystem will be able to migrate and run existing applications on Snowflake without rewriting code, and roll out new ones more confidently.”
Crunchy Data’s Paul Laurence wrote that the deal would enable Postgres adoption at scale, and “the potential to expand our contribution to the Postgres ecosystem and community.”
Snowflake cited Blue Yonder and Landing AI, which both use Postgres as well as Snowflake, as examples of the sort of companies will be able to “consolidate their application stack, unlocking increased efficiency and cost savings.”
Snowflake said the deal would “Complement Unistore, our innovative solution that unifies transactional and analytical data within a single database, by providing an enterprise-ready option for transactional applications that require Postgres compatibility.”
Or at least it will when the deal closes. Snowflake said this was expected “imminently.”
