10 ms·

CockroachDB 2.0 released

299 points by nate_stewart 9y ago

bit_4l 9y ago
Congrats on the great advancement. It's also a coincidence that TablePlus just started to support CockroachDB yesterday. In case someone need a good GUI: https://github.com/TablePlus/TablePlus/issues/374 https://github.com/TablePlus/TablePlus/issues/374
davidy123 9y ago
I think names are important. CockroachDB and GunDB both chose names that will hurt their acceptance. I often wonder how intentional it is for open source projects to choose strange names (GIMP, etc). Is it a defense against having to fit in with "mainstream" perspectives? Also, I wonder why Apache doesn't change their name. It would be a good opportunity for rebranding.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
michaelmior 9y ago
Geo-partitioning seems to be the killer feature here especially with GDPR looming. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of any other DB which makes physically locating records in a particular region so easy.
- synthmeat 9y ago
  You can create geo-zones for your MongoDB shards. [1] It has pretty powerful geo-spatial queries too, but that's unrelated. [1] https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/tutorial/sharding-segmenting-data-by-location/ https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/tutorial/sharding-segmenting...
notheguyouthink 9y ago
Here's a different take on databases.. Which is easiest to manage for a shop with minimal DB knowledge. That seems like a scary situation, .. and you're correct. It doesn't change the reality though, heh. So how does Cockroach compare to Postgres, or Maria, TiDB, etc on ease of management? Any thoughts?
- manigandham 9y ago
  If you want rock-solid stability? Just use Postgres. Decades of production use, experts easily available, and scales very high on a single node. Replication and backup are solved and there are lots of extensions for more functionality. You can also try the hosted options which all cloud vendors have, or I recommend Aiven. Don't use any distributed relational database unless you actually have a need for it, like horizontal scalability for massive data, multi-regional access, or 100% uptime guarantees.
  - notheguyouthink 9y ago
    Appreciate the insight
- truth_seeker 9y ago
  Honorable mention - CitusDB It installs as Postgres extension and supports parallelization of queries across nodes. https://www.citusdata.com/ https://www.citusdata.com/
jinqueeny 9y ago
Congrats on a major achievement, CRDB! It’s been really hard-core and cool stuff! Super excited to see that one more use case is coming in, the one with the Blockchain! In case someone is interested, TiDB released a case study with Mobike (with a daily data growth at ~30TB) just one day before: https://www.pingcap.com/blog/Use-Case-TiDB-in-Mobike/ https://www.pingcap.com/blog/Use-Case-TiDB-in-Mobike/
kevindqc 9y ago
I thought the name was weird and found this: The name was chosen in 2012, two years before the open source project was started. I had just gotten done with an exhausting and ultimately frustrating survey of OSS database products for the backend of a new private photo sharing service called Viewfinder. I'd tried and found wanting MySQL, Postgres, AWS SimpleDB, Hbase, Cassandra, and Riak. I was annoyed. Why wasn't there a scalable, survivable, consistent database with transactions? I was even willing to drop transactions as a requirement – a terrible sacrifice. The frustration led me to write a manifesto. What would the "right" database look like? I imagined it would be composed of symmetric nodes, require no external dependencies, spread itself naturally across availability zones for survival. Each node would autonomously replicate and repair data. These were the capabilities that led me to the name "cockroach", because they'll colonize the available resources and are nearly impossible to kill. - Spencer Kimball
- mynameishere 9y ago
  The unkillability of cockroaches is highly exaggerated. And for dogged persistence, I'd give the crown to the humble fruit fly.
- jaequery 9y ago
  sounds to me like the blockchain before blockchain. i personally feel blockchain hasnt lived up to its potential because it cant yet act as a viable database. i am curious to see who would take that throne . potentially cockroachdb seem to be in a good spot for that with some adjustments.
  - lotyrin 9y ago
    It wasn't before blockchain. Not everything distributed and fault tolerant is blockchain. You can't sprinkle blockchain fairy dust on problems unless your problems are insufficient hype.
- hashkb 9y ago
  Can mods just delete comments about the name of this project? It's getting absurd.
MockObject 9y ago
I wouldn't use it because I just don't want to see and write its name daily.
- krylon 9y ago
  Well, it is open source, you can just fork it and rename it to, say, ButterflyDB. ;-)
- cblades 9y ago
  Well that's silly.
- shepardrtc 9y ago
  People are downvoting you, but there's something to be said about it. What happens if you try to pitch CockroachDB to your non-techie upper management? They're going to look at you like you're an idiot. Names aren't important unless they're bad because first impressions do matter.
  - ontofractal 9y ago
    > They're going to look at you like you're an idiot. Are they really going to? As someone with many years of marketing/branding/advertising experience, CockroachDB is a bold, powerful and meaningful name, that, in my opinion, is one of the best branding cases I've ever seen for tech infra products.
  - knz42 9y ago
    Say "CRDB" and move on with your day.
    - rattray 9y ago
      While I agree with the spirit, and don't share gp's attitude, that probably wouldn't be effective for web search.
  - lucozade 9y ago
    I'm guessing that the downvotes are because people consider the stated reason to be a terrible one. Your point, which is that other people may use the same justification, doesn't validate the point. It just means that there may be more than one person who would use the same, poor, reason.
truth_seeker 9y ago
Is community edition build capable of Multi DC ?
- pat2man 9y ago
  Yes, but for multi DC you will probably want many of the tools in the enterprise edition: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/
  - truth_seeker 9y ago
    I see. Thanks.
  - teraflop 9y ago
    There's a noticeable lack of pricing on that "pricing" page...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
udia 9y ago
I find it very interesting that although CockroachDB itself is stable and production ready, all of the client drivers are still 'beta'. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/install-client-drivers.html https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/install-client-dri... That being said, I am really excited to try this out. 2.0 adding JSON support is what converted me to try this out for a project.
- atwebb 9y ago
  Most seem to just be postgres drivers.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- manigandham 9y ago
  It uses the postgresql interface so any Postgres compatible client should work. The status just refers to esoteric features that may not be supported.
- sigstoat 9y ago
  it uses standard, off the self postgresql libraries. but their server-side implementation of postgresql isn't 100%. or even 98%, so you can't count on every feature of every client library working.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- awoods187 9y ago
  We marked these drivers as beta support to indicate that we haven't tested them to the same rigor as our internally developed features. Basic querying and transactions should work with any of these drivers, but features like introspection and less commonly-used data types haven't been extensively tested across all drivers. Many people report using these drivers in production, however, we've prioritized new feature development for CockroachDB over extensive driver testing. We encourage you to give these drivers a try and let us know if you encounter any issues--we'll be happy to fix any bugs brought to our attention.
pat2man 9y ago
I think the combination of Cockroach and Kubernetes is going to be a game changer. Modern orchestration tools really are still struggling with single points of failure and Cockroach really shines there. The fact that both tools are maturing at around the same time is a real win for Cockroach. Additionally its use of certificate authentication just fits in with the rest of Kubernetes.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  How does Kubernetes help with failover?
  - lilbobbytables 9y ago
    It's distributed, with no single point of failure. Your machines or vms that manage the cluster (should be) separate from those running the containers. Ideally you set up 3 master nodes, with distributed etcd cluster for state, and enough machines to run your services with replication. All of which is not bad at all to get started with if you use something like Kops. Some useful docs: https://kubernetes.io/docs/admin/high-availability/building/ https://kubernetes.io/docs/admin/high-availability/building/
bogomipz 9y ago
Tangentially related - I would be interested in hearing anyone's experience so running CockroachDB 1.x in production.
mkhalil 9y ago
Queue the comments about it's name... Congratulations to the CockroachDB team. I have been using this on a few projects. I find the ease of scalability and redundancy very nice. Also, the ability to use SQL commands on a transactional DB is REALLY helpful. Keep it up.
caleblloyd 9y ago
I am genuinely interested in using CockroachDB as a primary datastore but feel like I have been burned too many times by hopping on board with a young database. I tried lucene based databases that offered amazing search capability but were riddled with data corruption issues. Then there was RethinkDB which was very promising but ran out of funding. I am skeptical that a networked database with multiple nodes can match the performance of a single master database such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server. I did a quick benchmark of CockroachDB 1.x and MySQL last year and found that CockroachDB was 5-10x slower on simple CRUD queries: https://github.com/caleblloyd/MySqlCockroachBench/wiki/Concurrency-Benchmark-Results https://github.com/caleblloyd/MySqlCockroachBench/wiki/Concu... Are there any good independent benchmarks of performance? According to crunchbase, Cockroach Labs has raised $53.5m (RethinkDB had only raised $12m). Is there evidence that Cockroach Labs is on track to make money and is going to survive? If the company is healthy and the performance is verified as close to a major RDBMS, I would be comfortable trying it out as a primary datastore. If those questions can't be definitely answered right now, I'll probably continue to wait for the company and the tech to mature.
- amelius 9y ago
  When it comes to databases, always wait for the Jepsen test! https://jepsen.io/ https://jepsen.io/
  - jordanlewis 9y ago
    CockroachDB underwent a Jepsen audit by Kyle Kingsbury before its 1.0 release. Check out the blog post[0] and Kyle's analysis[1]. We also run Jepsen tests against the database nightly, ensuring that its isolation guarantees do not regress. [0]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdb-beta-passes-jepsen-testing/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdb-beta-passes-j... [1]: http://jepsen.io/analyses/cockroachdb-beta-20160829 http://jepsen.io/analyses/cockroachdb-beta-20160829
  - michaelmior 9y ago
    Which they've been doing for around 2 years at least https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/diy-jepsen-testing-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/diy-jepsen-testing-cockro...
misterbowfinger 9y ago
Reposting this to see if anyone could comment (last time i promise): So. For me, personally, I don't care about the name. I generally care that it's great tech, and it clearly has a great team behind it. However.... If I worked at CockroachDB, and I saw the negative feedback around the name, I'd take it to heart. At the end of the day, the name is marketing for the hard work of their engineers, and marketing for the engineers that want to use this DB (remember, they need to sell it to their managers who may not be technical). This issue can show up in unexpected ways. For example, for cloud providers like Compose (IBM company), would they be comfortable with putting "CockroachDB" on the front page? They might if it's good enough, but it's at least a consideration (i.e. another meeting, another stakeholder to convince). Or how about an enterprise company that's going through due diligence, and when their client asks them about their tech stack do they say "CockroachDB" or do they obfuscate the name by saying "It's a high-performance distributed database". That's a crucial moment to market CockroachDB, and it could get lost. As sad as it is, saying that you're using MySQL "because Oracle" is a point of leverage for some sales people. Is the name worth it? Asking honestly.
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  > I saw the negative feedback around the name, I'd take it to heart. You shouldn't, marketing is not about your personal feelings or feedback on your marketing. Cockroach name is clearly superior to every other database name, look how memorable it is and how much buzz it generates.
didibus 9y ago
Can someone explain the inner workings and thus tradeoffs it makes? And how it would impact when and how you'd want to use it?
- tshannon 9y ago
  The FAQ on the website is a good place to start: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/frequently-asked-questions.html https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/frequently-asked-q... When is CockroachDB a good choice? CockroachDB is well suited for applications that require reliable, available, and correct data regardless of scale. It is built to automatically replicate, rebalance, and recover with minimal configuration and operational overhead. Specific use cases include: Distributed or replicated OLTP Multi-datacenter deployments Multi-region deployments Cloud migrations Cloud-native infrastructure initiatives When is CockroachDB not a good choice? CockroachDB is not a good choice when very low latency reads and writes are critical; use an in-memory database instead. Also, CockroachDB is not yet suitable for: Heavy analytics / OLAP
  - didibus 9y ago
    I guess I was hoping for the engineering expert FAQ. What level of reliability, how, what tradeoff in my table design will I need to make, same thing for availability, correctness and scale. None of the info in this FAQ allow me to know that CockroachDB is the right choice for me against the competition which advertises the same generic DB marketing terms. Edit: And yes, I can go and read the documentation and deep dive into the internals myself, but I don't care enough to do so, because I already have DBs that fulfill those use cases that I know off, and I would hope therefore that CockroachDB would make it very quick, easy and in my face to find the info that will make me go: Ah Ha, this is the distinguishing factor and the reason why I might want to favor and care to use CockroachDB the next time I've got such a use case.
irfansharif 9y ago
For those in the area, the CockroachDB folk are hosting a meetup demoing some of the new 2.0 niceties: https://twitter.com/CockroachDB/status/978701442050592768?s=20 https://twitter.com/CockroachDB/status/978701442050592768?s=...
doall 9y ago
Is there any good abbreviation or a nickname for this DB? Initially I thought I could get used to it, but after many years watching in HN I haven't succeeded yet. Perhaps you cut the word in half, but it just creates another two strong words and shows the survival power of the word :( Calling it CDB doesn't click to me either.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  I've seen CockroachLabs refer to it as CRDB.
- loiselleatwork 9y ago
  We call it CRDB internally
- brepl 9y ago
  I've seen people referring to CockroachLabs referring to it as CRDB internally.
lacker 9y ago
Question on the efficiency of inverted indices for Cockroach json tables - if you do a query for identity on two of the fields, like searching for all json documents containing `{a: 1, b: 2}`, how efficient is that? Will it essentially only use one of the indices on a and b, or will it work like a sql multi column btree index?
- foldU 9y ago
  Good question! In 2.0 we only use one of the fields for the index lookup and then use the rest as a filter. For 2.1 we’re planning on augmenting our execution engine to enable making use of all the fields in a more efficient way. We have an RFC[0] describing the way our inverted indexes are designed, though not everything outlined in that document is implemented yet. [0]: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/RFCS/20171020_inverted_indexes.md https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/RF...

299 points by nate_stewart 9y ago

Congrats on the great advancement. It's also a coincidence that TablePlus just started to support CockroachDB yesterday. In case someone need a good GUI: https://github.com/TablePlus/TablePlus/issues/374 https://github.com/TablePlus/TablePlus/issues/374

davidy123 9y ago

I think names are important. CockroachDB and GunDB both chose names that will hurt their acceptance. I often wonder how intentional it is for open source projects to choose strange names (GIMP, etc). Is it a defense against having to fit in with "mainstream" perspectives? Also, I wonder why Apache doesn't change their name. It would be a good opportunity for rebranding.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

michaelmior 9y ago

Geo-partitioning seems to be the killer feature here especially with GDPR looming. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of any other DB which makes physically locating records in a particular region so easy.

synthmeat 9y ago
You can create geo-zones for your MongoDB shards. [1] It has pretty powerful geo-spatial queries too, but that's unrelated. [1] https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/tutorial/sharding-segmenting-data-by-location/ https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/tutorial/sharding-segmenting...

notheguyouthink 9y ago

Here's a different take on databases.. Which is easiest to manage for a shop with minimal DB knowledge. That seems like a scary situation, .. and you're correct. It doesn't change the reality though, heh. So how does Cockroach compare to Postgres, or Maria, TiDB, etc on ease of management? Any thoughts?

manigandham 9y ago
If you want rock-solid stability? Just use Postgres. Decades of production use, experts easily available, and scales very high on a single node. Replication and backup are solved and there are lots of extensions for more functionality. You can also try the hosted options which all cloud vendors have, or I recommend Aiven. Don't use any distributed relational database unless you actually have a need for it, like horizontal scalability for massive data, multi-regional access, or 100% uptime guarantees.
- notheguyouthink 9y ago
  Appreciate the insight
truth_seeker 9y ago
Honorable mention - CitusDB It installs as Postgres extension and supports parallelization of queries across nodes. https://www.citusdata.com/ https://www.citusdata.com/

jinqueeny 9y ago

Congrats on a major achievement, CRDB! It’s been really hard-core and cool stuff! Super excited to see that one more use case is coming in, the one with the Blockchain! In case someone is interested, TiDB released a case study with Mobike (with a daily data growth at ~30TB) just one day before: https://www.pingcap.com/blog/Use-Case-TiDB-in-Mobike/ https://www.pingcap.com/blog/Use-Case-TiDB-in-Mobike/

kevindqc 9y ago

I thought the name was weird and found this: The name was chosen in 2012, two years before the open source project was started. I had just gotten done with an exhausting and ultimately frustrating survey of OSS database products for the backend of a new private photo sharing service called Viewfinder. I'd tried and found wanting MySQL, Postgres, AWS SimpleDB, Hbase, Cassandra, and Riak. I was annoyed. Why wasn't there a scalable, survivable, consistent database with transactions? I was even willing to drop transactions as a requirement – a terrible sacrifice. The frustration led me to write a manifesto. What would the "right" database look like? I imagined it would be composed of symmetric nodes, require no external dependencies, spread itself naturally across availability zones for survival. Each node would autonomously replicate and repair data. These were the capabilities that led me to the name "cockroach", because they'll colonize the available resources and are nearly impossible to kill. - Spencer Kimball

mynameishere 9y ago
The unkillability of cockroaches is highly exaggerated. And for dogged persistence, I'd give the crown to the humble fruit fly.
jaequery 9y ago
sounds to me like the blockchain before blockchain. i personally feel blockchain hasnt lived up to its potential because it cant yet act as a viable database. i am curious to see who would take that throne . potentially cockroachdb seem to be in a good spot for that with some adjustments.
- lotyrin 9y ago
  It wasn't before blockchain. Not everything distributed and fault tolerant is blockchain. You can't sprinkle blockchain fairy dust on problems unless your problems are insufficient hype.
hashkb 9y ago
Can mods just delete comments about the name of this project? It's getting absurd.

MockObject 9y ago

I wouldn't use it because I just don't want to see and write its name daily.

krylon 9y ago
Well, it is open source, you can just fork it and rename it to, say, ButterflyDB. ;-)
cblades 9y ago
Well that's silly.
shepardrtc 9y ago
People are downvoting you, but there's something to be said about it. What happens if you try to pitch CockroachDB to your non-techie upper management? They're going to look at you like you're an idiot. Names aren't important unless they're bad because first impressions do matter.
- ontofractal 9y ago
  > They're going to look at you like you're an idiot. Are they really going to? As someone with many years of marketing/branding/advertising experience, CockroachDB is a bold, powerful and meaningful name, that, in my opinion, is one of the best branding cases I've ever seen for tech infra products.
- knz42 9y ago
  Say "CRDB" and move on with your day.
  - rattray 9y ago
    While I agree with the spirit, and don't share gp's attitude, that probably wouldn't be effective for web search.
- lucozade 9y ago
  I'm guessing that the downvotes are because people consider the stated reason to be a terrible one. Your point, which is that other people may use the same justification, doesn't validate the point. It just means that there may be more than one person who would use the same, poor, reason.

truth_seeker 9y ago

Is community edition build capable of Multi DC ?

pat2man 9y ago
Yes, but for multi DC you will probably want many of the tools in the enterprise edition: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/
- truth_seeker 9y ago
  I see. Thanks.
- teraflop 9y ago
  There's a noticeable lack of pricing on that "pricing" page...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

udia 9y ago

I find it very interesting that although CockroachDB itself is stable and production ready, all of the client drivers are still 'beta'. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/install-client-drivers.html https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/install-client-dri... That being said, I am really excited to try this out. 2.0 adding JSON support is what converted me to try this out for a project.

atwebb 9y ago
Most seem to just be postgres drivers.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
manigandham 9y ago
It uses the postgresql interface so any Postgres compatible client should work. The status just refers to esoteric features that may not be supported.
sigstoat 9y ago
it uses standard, off the self postgresql libraries. but their server-side implementation of postgresql isn't 100%. or even 98%, so you can't count on every feature of every client library working.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
awoods187 9y ago
We marked these drivers as beta support to indicate that we haven't tested them to the same rigor as our internally developed features. Basic querying and transactions should work with any of these drivers, but features like introspection and less commonly-used data types haven't been extensively tested across all drivers. Many people report using these drivers in production, however, we've prioritized new feature development for CockroachDB over extensive driver testing. We encourage you to give these drivers a try and let us know if you encounter any issues--we'll be happy to fix any bugs brought to our attention.

pat2man 9y ago

I think the combination of Cockroach and Kubernetes is going to be a game changer. Modern orchestration tools really are still struggling with single points of failure and Cockroach really shines there. The fact that both tools are maturing at around the same time is a real win for Cockroach. Additionally its use of certificate authentication just fits in with the rest of Kubernetes.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
How does Kubernetes help with failover?
- lilbobbytables 9y ago
  It's distributed, with no single point of failure. Your machines or vms that manage the cluster (should be) separate from those running the containers. Ideally you set up 3 master nodes, with distributed etcd cluster for state, and enough machines to run your services with replication. All of which is not bad at all to get started with if you use something like Kops. Some useful docs: https://kubernetes.io/docs/admin/high-availability/building/ https://kubernetes.io/docs/admin/high-availability/building/

bogomipz 9y ago

Tangentially related - I would be interested in hearing anyone's experience so running CockroachDB 1.x in production.

mkhalil 9y ago

Queue the comments about it's name... Congratulations to the CockroachDB team. I have been using this on a few projects. I find the ease of scalability and redundancy very nice. Also, the ability to use SQL commands on a transactional DB is REALLY helpful. Keep it up.

caleblloyd 9y ago

I am genuinely interested in using CockroachDB as a primary datastore but feel like I have been burned too many times by hopping on board with a young database. I tried lucene based databases that offered amazing search capability but were riddled with data corruption issues. Then there was RethinkDB which was very promising but ran out of funding. I am skeptical that a networked database with multiple nodes can match the performance of a single master database such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server. I did a quick benchmark of CockroachDB 1.x and MySQL last year and found that CockroachDB was 5-10x slower on simple CRUD queries: https://github.com/caleblloyd/MySqlCockroachBench/wiki/Concurrency-Benchmark-Results https://github.com/caleblloyd/MySqlCockroachBench/wiki/Concu... Are there any good independent benchmarks of performance? According to crunchbase, Cockroach Labs has raised $53.5m (RethinkDB had only raised $12m). Is there evidence that Cockroach Labs is on track to make money and is going to survive? If the company is healthy and the performance is verified as close to a major RDBMS, I would be comfortable trying it out as a primary datastore. If those questions can't be definitely answered right now, I'll probably continue to wait for the company and the tech to mature.

amelius 9y ago
When it comes to databases, always wait for the Jepsen test! https://jepsen.io/ https://jepsen.io/
- jordanlewis 9y ago
  CockroachDB underwent a Jepsen audit by Kyle Kingsbury before its 1.0 release. Check out the blog post[0] and Kyle's analysis[1]. We also run Jepsen tests against the database nightly, ensuring that its isolation guarantees do not regress. [0]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdb-beta-passes-jepsen-testing/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdb-beta-passes-j... [1]: http://jepsen.io/analyses/cockroachdb-beta-20160829 http://jepsen.io/analyses/cockroachdb-beta-20160829
- michaelmior 9y ago
  Which they've been doing for around 2 years at least https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/diy-jepsen-testing-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/diy-jepsen-testing-cockro...

misterbowfinger 9y ago

Reposting this to see if anyone could comment (last time i promise): So. For me, personally, I don't care about the name. I generally care that it's great tech, and it clearly has a great team behind it. However.... If I worked at CockroachDB, and I saw the negative feedback around the name, I'd take it to heart. At the end of the day, the name is marketing for the hard work of their engineers, and marketing for the engineers that want to use this DB (remember, they need to sell it to their managers who may not be technical). This issue can show up in unexpected ways. For example, for cloud providers like Compose (IBM company), would they be comfortable with putting "CockroachDB" on the front page? They might if it's good enough, but it's at least a consideration (i.e. another meeting, another stakeholder to convince). Or how about an enterprise company that's going through due diligence, and when their client asks them about their tech stack do they say "CockroachDB" or do they obfuscate the name by saying "It's a high-performance distributed database". That's a crucial moment to market CockroachDB, and it could get lost. As sad as it is, saying that you're using MySQL "because Oracle" is a point of leverage for some sales people. Is the name worth it? Asking honestly.

zzzcpan 9y ago
> I saw the negative feedback around the name, I'd take it to heart. You shouldn't, marketing is not about your personal feelings or feedback on your marketing. Cockroach name is clearly superior to every other database name, look how memorable it is and how much buzz it generates.

didibus 9y ago

Can someone explain the inner workings and thus tradeoffs it makes? And how it would impact when and how you'd want to use it?

tshannon 9y ago
The FAQ on the website is a good place to start: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/frequently-asked-questions.html https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/frequently-asked-q... When is CockroachDB a good choice? CockroachDB is well suited for applications that require reliable, available, and correct data regardless of scale. It is built to automatically replicate, rebalance, and recover with minimal configuration and operational overhead. Specific use cases include: Distributed or replicated OLTP Multi-datacenter deployments Multi-region deployments Cloud migrations Cloud-native infrastructure initiatives When is CockroachDB not a good choice? CockroachDB is not a good choice when very low latency reads and writes are critical; use an in-memory database instead. Also, CockroachDB is not yet suitable for: Heavy analytics / OLAP
- didibus 9y ago
  I guess I was hoping for the engineering expert FAQ. What level of reliability, how, what tradeoff in my table design will I need to make, same thing for availability, correctness and scale. None of the info in this FAQ allow me to know that CockroachDB is the right choice for me against the competition which advertises the same generic DB marketing terms. Edit: And yes, I can go and read the documentation and deep dive into the internals myself, but I don't care enough to do so, because I already have DBs that fulfill those use cases that I know off, and I would hope therefore that CockroachDB would make it very quick, easy and in my face to find the info that will make me go: Ah Ha, this is the distinguishing factor and the reason why I might want to favor and care to use CockroachDB the next time I've got such a use case.

irfansharif 9y ago

For those in the area, the CockroachDB folk are hosting a meetup demoing some of the new 2.0 niceties: https://twitter.com/CockroachDB/status/978701442050592768?s=20 https://twitter.com/CockroachDB/status/978701442050592768?s=...

doall 9y ago

Is there any good abbreviation or a nickname for this DB? Initially I thought I could get used to it, but after many years watching in HN I haven't succeeded yet. Perhaps you cut the word in half, but it just creates another two strong words and shows the survival power of the word :( Calling it CDB doesn't click to me either.

bryanlarsen 9y ago
I've seen CockroachLabs refer to it as CRDB.
loiselleatwork 9y ago
We call it CRDB internally
brepl 9y ago
I've seen people referring to CockroachLabs referring to it as CRDB internally.

lacker 9y ago

Question on the efficiency of inverted indices for Cockroach json tables - if you do a query for identity on two of the fields, like searching for all json documents containing `{a: 1, b: 2}`, how efficient is that? Will it essentially only use one of the indices on a and b, or will it work like a sql multi column btree index?

foldU 9y ago
Good question! In 2.0 we only use one of the fields for the index lookup and then use the rest as a filter. For 2.1 we’re planning on augmenting our execution engine to enable making use of all the fields in a more efficient way. We have an RFC[0] describing the way our inverted indexes are designed, though not everything outlined in that document is implemented yet. [0]: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/RFCS/20171020_inverted_indexes.md https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/RF...