11 ms·

Could the name actually slow the project's momentum? I only recently read some cool things about CDB and wondered if I could have been subconsciously skipping

• Perignon 10y ago
  Agree, the name is pretty off putting. Maybe they were trying to be funny? I don't know, but I would recommend changing it.
  • andrewchambers 10y ago
    the level of bikeshedding on the name is crazy. I think it is a good name btw.
    • nine_k 10y ago
      The amount of rejection this name evokes is considerable. Maybe they should think about branding, unless their target is to stay in the fringe.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
• finder83 10y ago
  I agree completely. I love reading about databases, but apparently have been skipping reading about CockroachDB for that same reason subconsciously. I took a deep dive the other day and was amazed that I've seen the name dozens of times and have never bothered to ask what was special about it. It really is a fascinating database.
  • AsyncAwait 10y ago
    Well, given the claimed properties of the database, I can see why they named it this way, but it is not the world's most fortunate name, for sure.
  • zzzcpan 10y ago
    No, you have not been skipping it subconsciously or seeing it more often, than others, you just feel like you did. People actually have an availability bias [1] that clouds their judgement about unusual things. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
    • finder83 10y ago
      Interesting, perhaps so. I did have a moment of realization that I had a negative bias against the name though.
  • omginternets 10y ago
    Same, to the point where I just now realized I know nothing about CockroachDB...
  • lallysingh 10y ago
    I completely wrote it off as a bug database. Only when it came up in conversation did I look it up.
  • SilasX 10y ago
    I had the same experience with Rust, for the same reason.
• geofft 10y ago
  Yeah, I've definitely heard people tell me "It seems cool, but not cool enough for me to get over the subconscious revulsion to the name" when asking about CDB. I appreciate the name, but I think I'd have an easier time convincing people to use a product of a different name....
• digler999 10y ago
  to me it's not a deeply-seeded reason, it's just when I hear cutesy-sounding names I just don't take them seriously. They sound like the latest, hipster thing that's going to be in-bloom for a (figurative) week or two until the next cutesy thing steals everyone's attention. Even the language Pony has a mildly off-putting name (to me) despite hearing people rave about it. Couch DB ? What the hell does that mean ? I admit it's a bias of mine and I could be losing out on learning amazing tools. But even non-profit, standardized languages and tools still have a brand name and image.
  • WhitneyLand 10y ago
    See your point, but maybe there's a middle ground between hipster and bug like?
  • huehehue 10y ago
    Ah yes, let's not forget the solid branding behind some of Adobe's work: https://pig.apache.org/ https://pig.apache.org/ https://hive.apache.org/ https://hive.apache.org/ (Look at the anguish in this creature's face) http://hadoop.apache.org/ http://hadoop.apache.org/
    • SilasX 10y ago
      Wait, is hive supposed to look like some elephant-bee hybrid?
      • lallysingh 10y ago
        I thought it was a bee mid-sneeze.
      • r00fus 10y ago
        It's supposed to be related to hadoop, right?
    • anoother 10y ago
      s/Adobe/Apache ?
• justicezyx 10y ago
  If CDB just wants to be a niche, live in a corner in the shadow of Cloud Spanner or other similar big players, the name is not critical. Otherwise, its a realistic issue has to be addressed.
• OpenDrapery 10y ago
  I'm wondering if all the people who can't get over the name CockroachDB are also people who insist that professionals should dress the part. Can't take someone seriously if they don't have their shirt tucked in? Style over substance.
  • WhitneyLand 10y ago
    Definitely not. The opposite in fact, I don't even require shoes or shirt if you're speaking rationally.
  • chipotle_coyote 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in having a bias against the name "CockroachDB" and being okay with people who don't have their shirt tucked in. I get the comparison you're making, but "untucked shirt" connotes "casual" to me. Roaches connote "health hazard." I'm okay with eating at casual restaurants, but not casual restaurants with roaches. If you have to explain "we want you to think about survivability, not health violations," then maybe the problem isn't your untucked shirt--it's the big grease stain covering its front. You can insist that's just part of your style all you want, but it's going to be a hard sell.
• wstrange 10y ago
  Maybe they should have called it TardigradeDB
  • theptip 10y ago
    TardigraDB?
    • oconnor663 10y ago
      Shardigrade.
• SilasX 10y ago
  Agree 100%, ditto for suggested alternate name. I'd been doing the same for Rust. It's not a rational reason, sure, but I have to sell adoption to a broader userbase that cares about more that the technical merits. I don't want to have to make the case for why someone's system needs rust and cockroaches.
  • JaggerFoo 10y ago
    "Rust and Cockroaches" is the title of Kenny Chesney's next Country Western song.
  • AsyncAwait 10y ago
    Rust is nowhere near Cockroaches in terms of what it evokes.
  • logingone 10y ago
    I have to say, I think that if you have a problem with "Rust" then you lose credibility in your criticism of "Cockroach". Contrary to most above, I think "Cockroach" is great. It's suitable. Any suit who has a problem with it should get back on their side of the office, and stop sticking their nose in things they know nothing about, especially when so evidently closed minded. There are too many people in that meeting. Hell, even "Google" is a crap name, sounding like a baby word, and "Mongo" can be outright offensive. I expect anyone who has an issue with the name "Cockroach" is probably not going to be too open to the cutting edge anyway, so wasted concern.
    • nine_k 10y ago
      If you want your product to extend from the cutting edge to the mainstream, you have to consider good naming.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• renegadesensei 10y ago
  Completely agree. I specialize in distributed databases and I have zero interest in even learning about CockroachDB. Could be the greatest technology ever and I will never know. Is that irrational? Sure. But I'm a busy man with plenty of tech to learn about and limited time. I detest roaches and do not want to think about them at all when I am working. Might as well have named it with an ethnic slur.
  • andrewchambers 10y ago
    You seem to specialize in willful ignorance and bike shedding to me.
    • renegadesensei 10y ago
      While you specialize in presumptuous ad hominem attacks against strangers on the internet. I like my vice better.
      • andrewchambers 10y ago
        I can only go off what you wrote, stating you are deliberately ignorant. I was just reiterating what you proudly said. Do you really think saying you are a specialist, yet won't read about the topic you specialize in because you are scared of a benign name is reasonable? I forgot to mention the ridiculous hyperbole comparing 'cockroach' to racial slurs.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
        • dwaltrip 10y ago
          Perhaps to a large fraction of relevant stakeholders, the name is a signal of project immaturity and perhaps poor judgement. Additionally, even if you aren't personally bothered it, most would be aware that others feel this way, which certainly creates an uphill battle for the tool and diminishes the prospect of a vibrant ecosystem building up around it. This is a red flag for anyone who might be considering including CockroachDB as an important part of their stack on any long-running project Do you discard such factors?
• jdcarter 10y ago
  Absolutely the name is holding them back. In my case it prevents me from championing the product within my company. Going to the executives and saying "we're going to put our most precious data into Cockroach" simply won't fly. Any discussion of features will be for naught; I know the CEO will make a "no" decision as soon as he hears the name. To any Cockroach Labs folks who might read this: please give me (and all of us) a name that I can evangelize without my audience cringing.
  • corndoge 10y ago
    If it's not too much trouble you might consider looking for a new job if management is that obtuse.
    • emptythought 10y ago
      Except this is going to be the common response of management at basically any large, or older company. Not everyone here works at startups, and this isn't something that's easy to just immediately change. This is an issue with a lot of weird or jokey project names, honestly.
    • jdcarter 10y ago
      Everybody makes decisions using both emotion and reason. This is why successful products speak to both the heart and the mind of the customer. Said another way, this is why the marketing department is just as essential to a company's success as the engineering department. I've worked with my company's executive team for quite a while, and they're not obtuse. They are human, however. When I go to them and suggest we trust our data to a new, up-and-coming database, I'm asking quite a lot. The cost of failure is extremely high, so I need to convince them at both an emotional and rational level that the risk is worth it. But when the conversation starts, "let me tell you about Cockroach..." I'm already starting from behind. The reason so many people are fussing about CockroachDB's name is because there's such a huge dissonance between a product that looks fantastic on its technical merits but has a name that triggers terrible images. Have you ever lived in a house with roaches? That's the kind of thing that wedges in your mind in the "never again" category.
• influx 10y ago
  It's a terrible name, it also has the property that stupidly configured web filters could filter it due to string matching the first part of the word. It also makes your employees look stupid when they tell their landlords, bank accounts, dates that they work at Cockroach Labs. Good luck explaining that you aren't an exterminator.
  • irfansharif 10y ago
    what's wrong with being an exterminator?
    • kornish 10y ago
      There's nothing wrong at all with being an exterminator – but in general you probably don't want people to assume you're something you're not. The name doesn't help with that.
  • fnord123 10y ago
    Do you work on influxdb?
    • influx 10y ago
      Nope, had this nickname years before the database. I approve of that name more than CockroachDB though ;)
• crudbug 10y ago
  Yes.. RoachDB sounds much better, if they want to continue with the same line of thought.
• throwawasiudy 10y ago
  their name is the stupidest startup blunder I've ever seen. Enterprise won't go near it, seriously. I cannot tell a client I'm using a "cockroach" database, no fucking way. If we could go back and rename Windows Hitler would anyone be using it???
  • justicezyx 10y ago
    Imagining introducing CDB in a room full of CXOs from an enterprise customer... CXO: What CDB stands for? Presenter: Cockroach Database! ...
    • throwawasiudy 10y ago
      Cloning a reply I made earlier talking about that exact situation: It's not my company or me, it's my clients. Here's a sort of long winded story explaining what I mean that the corporate world can't use anything with the name "cockroach". If you disagree after reading, I'm open for a friendly debate. Average project, some 60 year old VP signing off on 100k of custom software with 8 pages of lawyer speak contracts is NOT going to allow "his" project to run off of "cockroach database". VP's/CEO's like to take personal ownership of projects they feel will go well, and ones done with us usually do. None of these people want ANY chance of their project getting criticized internally, so nobody will use CockroachDb. It's just not going to happen. Having successful projects is an easy way for these people to gather promotions and respect. Having any part of it do with "cockroach" could result in the whole project being an embarrassment. Imagine the database goes down one day. One of their low level staff calls us(we have ongoing support contract). Problem gets rapidly escalated to development. One of our lead developers replies to the email thread, that by now has a third of the clients' company on it. "Yeah see the problem was the cockroach database that wasn't supposed to go down needed to be restarted" . Most of the staff think we're joking. Guarantee this becomes a big pun around their office, every time anything breaks in the app they say "maybe the cockroaches on the back end died again". It's made worse by the fact that issues in software systems are commonly called "bugs". Well, our system doesn't have general bugs anymore, it has "cockroaches". Do you think this is an unlikely scenario? Because it's not. Besides the word "cockroach" this is exactly how urgent issues tend to be reported and fixed. Replace "cockroach" with "Microsoft" and I've probably violated my NDA. After that incident, whoever championed the project, probably our strongest ally in the company, resents us for making such a stupid mistake that resulted in his project becoming a joke. Maybe we aren't as great of a dev shop as he once thought? Maybe it's better to do open bidding next time so whoever wins he can't be blamed directly for what happens. You could say their company culture sucks, maybe it does? But that doesn't change that I can't use it on any client projects because of the chance we'll lose hundreds of thousands over a stupid name. There's plenty of other names that convey meaning but don't make lawyers nervous. Your attitude of "oh, well if you can't use it your company culture sucks" is EXACTLY why nobody will rename it and why corporate american won't touch it. Nobody cares about how cool it is to be edgy when millions of dollars are on the line. If you plan on forcing clients to use it you might as well hold a going away party for any of your clients with more than 5M revenue.
• Fiahil 10y ago
  As a former SC2 Zerg player, I found the name a bit funny, nothing more. A really bad name, would be, for example, to try calling a news agency "BuzzFeed News".
• Birch-san 10y ago
  I submit "Bunker" as a more approachable name. Not only does it have the connotation of "survives nuclear bombardment", but also suggests "keep your stuff safe here" and "something you could entrust with your life".
  • adamtulinius 10y ago
    The name "Bunker" also suggest that the developers are German nazis, since German nazis built a large amount of bunkers in Europe during WW2. .. so probably not a good name either, at least not in Europe. ;-)
    • wingerlang 10y ago
      That's a bit of a stretch.
  • andybons 10y ago
    Already taken: https://bunkerdb.com/ https://bunkerdb.com/
• elcct 10y ago
  At least it is not GrabherbythepussyDB ;)
  • dang 10y ago
    We've banned this account for posting uncivil/unsubstantive comments and ignoring repeated requests to stop.
• _mg 10y ago
  Well, I know I definitely won't forget the name.
• ArlenBales 10y ago
  It might be intentional as reverse psychology. They don't want employees or users who wouldn't use a project because it's named after an unpopular insect. Those users/employees could be fickle, unreasonable and low quality at other aspects of business/development and be a net loss for the company/project in the long term.
  • manigandham 10y ago
    That is a terrible way to run a business.