8 ms·

Managed CockroachDB: Geo-Distributed Database as a Service

151 points by louis-paul 8y ago

leibwiht 8y ago
What a dreadful name.
- bb1234 8y ago
  You are being downvoted. But I have to agree. I cannot even think about using it because of the name. Whenever I force myself to get over it and go to their page, picture of a cockroach is too much to take.
  - thomasjudge 8y ago
    Agree, much less bring it into an enterprise environment
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    The downvoting is not necessarily because we disagree, but because this conversation belongs on the bottom of the page below the much more interesting conversation above.
  - mlevental 8y ago
    how conservative do you have to be to care about the name of your rdbms. like ffs
- dang 8y ago
  Understandable, but there have been so many boring threads about this that we need to just not to go there.
- barbecue_sauce 8y ago
  You're being downvoted, but you're being downvoted.
notacoward 8y ago
Congrats to the Cockroach crew. CockroachDB is a very interesting project, and this will make its functionality available to a wider audience.
dsl 8y ago
CockroachDB is looking more and more like a viable replacement for MySQL (now that they have importing mysqldump in beta) However key management in clusters is an absolute nightmare. They need to look at Docker Swarm for how to build a usable "join" mechanism. Until then, the majority of folks just use --insecure in production.
- benesch 8y ago
  CockroachDB engineer here. > However key management in clusters is an absolute nightmare. They need to look at Docker Swarm for how to build a usable "join" mechanism. I'll contend that key management is one of the great unsolved problems in software deployment. I don't want to diminish the value of removing friction from the user experience, but fundamentally there is not that much of a difference between providing a token directly as a command line argument vs. providing a certificate that lives on disk. I'm curious if your frustration is mostly from the overhead of creating node certificates or if there's a deeper problem I'm not seeing. I should also mention: this is an area we're actively looking to improve in! If you have time to write up a slightly more detailed proposal as a GitHub issue, we'd be happy to entertain it.
  - dsl 8y ago
    > I'll contend that key management is one of the great unsolved problems in software deployment. Docker Swarm and Salt minions are really good examples of how it should work from a user interaction standpoint. Let me spin up a dozen or a hundred instances from the same configuration management template without having to seed each one with a secret, or build my own tooling to distribute certs to them. From one central point I approve new joins. Manage the CA and certificates within the cluster, don't expect your customers to do it. Make a big poster for your office that says "Our real customers don't know how to do devops." MySQL took off because dumb people like me can get it to work. Thanks for listening.
  - smnscu 8y ago
    Any chance of integration with k8s/istio cert management? A quick Google search doesn't bring up anything relevant.
puzzle 8y ago
So what's the price? For Spanner, which is perhaps their closest competitor, it takes a few seconds to find at least the list price, before discounts and such.
- strict9 8y ago
  They sure don't make it easy to find on their site, though this post breaks down some of it: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/aurora-price-vs-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/aurora-price-vs-cockroach... Cockroaches team also have their customers as a top level nav item now, though Baidu is the only one I recognize: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/customers/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/customers/
  - _jezell_ 8y ago
    They compared the free version pricing, not enterprise.
- philip1209 8y ago
  Databases are the core of a digital business. The opportunity cost of losing data is huge. Customers won't blindly trust a product with their data until they understand the pricing. Nobody is putting this DB into production on a 30-day free trial with no pricing info. CockroachDB focuses a lot on showing technical users that they can trust the product. If they want to make money, then they need to become a trustworthy vendor, too.
- _jezell_ 8y ago
  They want $10k per year per core, making it pretty much the most expensive thing you could possibly use as a database and multiple times more expensive than SQL Server over the course of a few years, and far more expensive than even using Oracle Cloud. It's a really well built product, but the pricing is not even close to compelling.
  - jamesweitzman 8y ago
    Cockroach Labs employee here. CockroachDB has pricing that is tiered to different customer needs and sizes. Reach out with a business need and you will see that our pricing is incredibly competitive (certainly lower than Oracle or SQL Server) and delivers a cloud-native, geo-distributed SQL solution that is unmatched.
rb808 8y ago
I'm never sure what is better - a service that is 99% reliable and you're used to failing over to a backup system because it happens a few times a year. Or a system that is 99.99% reliable and you're ed when it goes down. Is there a name for that dilemma and a preferred option? I like the idea of super reilable services, but I'm also comforted by old fashioned databases I know, and have dealt with lots of live problems.
- pkulak 8y ago
  Not sure there's a name for it, but it's exactly why Chaos Monkey was built.
- qaq 8y ago
  1st option is better the 99.99 generally holds only if it is managed by someone with very deep knowledge of the system and in case of CockroachDB it's pretty much the core team.
dominotw 8y ago
Does anyone have any comparison to other new sql offerings foundationdb, nuodb ect
- qaq 8y ago
  foundationdb the sql layer was not opensourced as far as I remember.
  - skyde 8y ago
    https://github.com/maximecaron/sql-parser https://github.com/maximecaron/sql-parser
    - qaq 8y ago
      look at the dates
- dongxu 8y ago
  TiDB(pingcap/tidb), it's another Spanner/F1 implementation, which is MySQL compatible.
- zenithm 8y ago
  Also FaunaDB which is the NoSQL version
elvinyung 8y ago
How is Cloud Spanner adoption nowadays? I seem to be hearing lately that more and more teams are looking seriously into adopting it.
- tyingq 8y ago
  They just added SQL DML (insert/update/delete) a couple of weeks ago. Adoption will probably head up now. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/develop-and-deploy-apps-more-easily-with-cloud-spanner-and-cloud-bigtable-updates https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/develop-and... Edited to note "SQL DML"...
  - romed 8y ago
    To clarify, you could always do these things via the native RPC interface. They added these things to the SQL interface.
- dijit 8y ago
  Spanner is absolutely amazing. If you can live with the fact that you’re 100% vendor locked to google. I can’t, so I run Postgres. But cockroachdb doesn’t have this problem.
- stonewhite 8y ago
  Backup and restore used to be a real pain. You had to write custom spark jobs previously. Currently, it is easier with the new dataflow integration, yet it still is not very smooth. Cloud functions don't have scheduled triggers, so we ended up setting up cron jobs on our K8s to trigger backups.
thepumpkin1979 8y ago
I've been using CRDB 2.0 for a toy project for a few weeks now, today I notice 2.1 was available so I started playing with some of their new features, I ran a SQL query with correlated sub-queries and then the server crashed. It's the first time I see a crash, so I rushed to the GitHub report to report the bug and to my surprise a GitHub issue was already created for the crash[0], it included the stack trace and an anonymized version of my SQL query that caused the crash. This really demonstrates they really care about the stability of their product, one more reason to keep recommending CockroachDB. [0] https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/32048 https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/32048
- beefsack 8y ago
  This is equal parts impressive and scary. It's awesome from a stability perspective, but I'm not completely comfortable with "dial home" functionality apparently being enabled by default in a database system.
  - knz42 8y ago
    It's printed "in bold letters on the label"; and like any sane db deployment you should firewall it off anyway.
  - rishav_sharan 8y ago
    If i remember it right, you can switch off the telemetry during installation
    - tyingq 8y ago
      Here's the details: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/diagnostics-reporting.html https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/diagnostics-report...
- StreamBright 8y ago
  That is great but I would rather have software which does not crash than a team of very enthusiastic developers who are eager to fix bugs. One example of this would be FoundationDB or Riak. I never managed to crash Riak in a production environment, I haven't used FoundationDB in production to say the same but based on the method they use to build the software is just mind blowing and afaik verrry efficient.
beefsack 8y ago
I asked previously when a CockroachDB post was on here, but didn't really get an answer to it. Is anyone running this in prod at a significant scale and able to comment on reliability and performance? I absolutely love CockroachDB in my toy projects, but am not yet feeling comfortable to commit to using it in prod.
- anaganisk 8y ago
  From what i can see from customers page: Heroic labs and baidu
tyingq 8y ago
"available at launch on both AWS and GCP" Curious if there was some technical barrier on Azure, or if it's perhaps coming later.
- skyde 8y ago
  I think AWS and GCP both provide a better custom time synchronisation system. This is not a deal breaker because CRDB could be configured with larger time drift tolerance. So maybe I am missing something!
- _jezell_ 8y ago
  AWS is gold standard so of course they would support it. Cockroach labs is backed by Google Ventures and run by former Googlers so that explains GCP. Azure may not have the most impressive tech stack, but plenty of non tech reasons for these decisions as well.

151 points by louis-paul 8y ago

leibwiht 8y ago

What a dreadful name.

bb1234 8y ago
You are being downvoted. But I have to agree. I cannot even think about using it because of the name. Whenever I force myself to get over it and go to their page, picture of a cockroach is too much to take.
- thomasjudge 8y ago
  Agree, much less bring it into an enterprise environment
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  The downvoting is not necessarily because we disagree, but because this conversation belongs on the bottom of the page below the much more interesting conversation above.
- mlevental 8y ago
  how conservative do you have to be to care about the name of your rdbms. like ffs
dang 8y ago
Understandable, but there have been so many boring threads about this that we need to just not to go there.
barbecue_sauce 8y ago
You're being downvoted, but you're being downvoted.

notacoward 8y ago

Congrats to the Cockroach crew. CockroachDB is a very interesting project, and this will make its functionality available to a wider audience.

dsl 8y ago

CockroachDB is looking more and more like a viable replacement for MySQL (now that they have importing mysqldump in beta) However key management in clusters is an absolute nightmare. They need to look at Docker Swarm for how to build a usable "join" mechanism. Until then, the majority of folks just use --insecure in production.

benesch 8y ago
CockroachDB engineer here. > However key management in clusters is an absolute nightmare. They need to look at Docker Swarm for how to build a usable "join" mechanism. I'll contend that key management is one of the great unsolved problems in software deployment. I don't want to diminish the value of removing friction from the user experience, but fundamentally there is not that much of a difference between providing a token directly as a command line argument vs. providing a certificate that lives on disk. I'm curious if your frustration is mostly from the overhead of creating node certificates or if there's a deeper problem I'm not seeing. I should also mention: this is an area we're actively looking to improve in! If you have time to write up a slightly more detailed proposal as a GitHub issue, we'd be happy to entertain it.
- dsl 8y ago
  > I'll contend that key management is one of the great unsolved problems in software deployment. Docker Swarm and Salt minions are really good examples of how it should work from a user interaction standpoint. Let me spin up a dozen or a hundred instances from the same configuration management template without having to seed each one with a secret, or build my own tooling to distribute certs to them. From one central point I approve new joins. Manage the CA and certificates within the cluster, don't expect your customers to do it. Make a big poster for your office that says "Our real customers don't know how to do devops." MySQL took off because dumb people like me can get it to work. Thanks for listening.
- smnscu 8y ago
  Any chance of integration with k8s/istio cert management? A quick Google search doesn't bring up anything relevant.

puzzle 8y ago

So what's the price? For Spanner, which is perhaps their closest competitor, it takes a few seconds to find at least the list price, before discounts and such.

strict9 8y ago
They sure don't make it easy to find on their site, though this post breaks down some of it: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/aurora-price-vs-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/aurora-price-vs-cockroach... Cockroaches team also have their customers as a top level nav item now, though Baidu is the only one I recognize: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/customers/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/customers/
- _jezell_ 8y ago
  They compared the free version pricing, not enterprise.
philip1209 8y ago
Databases are the core of a digital business. The opportunity cost of losing data is huge. Customers won't blindly trust a product with their data until they understand the pricing. Nobody is putting this DB into production on a 30-day free trial with no pricing info. CockroachDB focuses a lot on showing technical users that they can trust the product. If they want to make money, then they need to become a trustworthy vendor, too.
_jezell_ 8y ago
They want $10k per year per core, making it pretty much the most expensive thing you could possibly use as a database and multiple times more expensive than SQL Server over the course of a few years, and far more expensive than even using Oracle Cloud. It's a really well built product, but the pricing is not even close to compelling.
- jamesweitzman 8y ago
  Cockroach Labs employee here. CockroachDB has pricing that is tiered to different customer needs and sizes. Reach out with a business need and you will see that our pricing is incredibly competitive (certainly lower than Oracle or SQL Server) and delivers a cloud-native, geo-distributed SQL solution that is unmatched.

rb808 8y ago

I'm never sure what is better - a service that is 99% reliable and you're used to failing over to a backup system because it happens a few times a year. Or a system that is 99.99% reliable and you're ed when it goes down. Is there a name for that dilemma and a preferred option? I like the idea of super reilable services, but I'm also comforted by old fashioned databases I know, and have dealt with lots of live problems.

pkulak 8y ago
Not sure there's a name for it, but it's exactly why Chaos Monkey was built.
qaq 8y ago
1st option is better the 99.99 generally holds only if it is managed by someone with very deep knowledge of the system and in case of CockroachDB it's pretty much the core team.

dominotw 8y ago

Does anyone have any comparison to other new sql offerings foundationdb, nuodb ect

qaq 8y ago
foundationdb the sql layer was not opensourced as far as I remember.
- skyde 8y ago
  https://github.com/maximecaron/sql-parser https://github.com/maximecaron/sql-parser
  - qaq 8y ago
    look at the dates
dongxu 8y ago
TiDB(pingcap/tidb), it's another Spanner/F1 implementation, which is MySQL compatible.
zenithm 8y ago
Also FaunaDB which is the NoSQL version

elvinyung 8y ago

How is Cloud Spanner adoption nowadays? I seem to be hearing lately that more and more teams are looking seriously into adopting it.

tyingq 8y ago
They just added SQL DML (insert/update/delete) a couple of weeks ago. Adoption will probably head up now. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/develop-and-deploy-apps-more-easily-with-cloud-spanner-and-cloud-bigtable-updates https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/develop-and... Edited to note "SQL DML"...
- romed 8y ago
  To clarify, you could always do these things via the native RPC interface. They added these things to the SQL interface.
dijit 8y ago
Spanner is absolutely amazing. If you can live with the fact that you’re 100% vendor locked to google. I can’t, so I run Postgres. But cockroachdb doesn’t have this problem.
stonewhite 8y ago
Backup and restore used to be a real pain. You had to write custom spark jobs previously. Currently, it is easier with the new dataflow integration, yet it still is not very smooth. Cloud functions don't have scheduled triggers, so we ended up setting up cron jobs on our K8s to trigger backups.

thepumpkin1979 8y ago

I've been using CRDB 2.0 for a toy project for a few weeks now, today I notice 2.1 was available so I started playing with some of their new features, I ran a SQL query with correlated sub-queries and then the server crashed. It's the first time I see a crash, so I rushed to the GitHub report to report the bug and to my surprise a GitHub issue was already created for the crash[0], it included the stack trace and an anonymized version of my SQL query that caused the crash. This really demonstrates they really care about the stability of their product, one more reason to keep recommending CockroachDB. [0] https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/32048 https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/32048

beefsack 8y ago
This is equal parts impressive and scary. It's awesome from a stability perspective, but I'm not completely comfortable with "dial home" functionality apparently being enabled by default in a database system.
- knz42 8y ago
  It's printed "in bold letters on the label"; and like any sane db deployment you should firewall it off anyway.
- rishav_sharan 8y ago
  If i remember it right, you can switch off the telemetry during installation
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Here's the details: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/diagnostics-reporting.html https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/diagnostics-report...
StreamBright 8y ago
That is great but I would rather have software which does not crash than a team of very enthusiastic developers who are eager to fix bugs. One example of this would be FoundationDB or Riak. I never managed to crash Riak in a production environment, I haven't used FoundationDB in production to say the same but based on the method they use to build the software is just mind blowing and afaik verrry efficient.

beefsack 8y ago

I asked previously when a CockroachDB post was on here, but didn't really get an answer to it. Is anyone running this in prod at a significant scale and able to comment on reliability and performance? I absolutely love CockroachDB in my toy projects, but am not yet feeling comfortable to commit to using it in prod.

anaganisk 8y ago
From what i can see from customers page: Heroic labs and baidu

tyingq 8y ago

"available at launch on both AWS and GCP" Curious if there was some technical barrier on Azure, or if it's perhaps coming later.

skyde 8y ago
I think AWS and GCP both provide a better custom time synchronisation system. This is not a deal breaker because CRDB could be configured with larger time drift tolerance. So maybe I am missing something!
_jezell_ 8y ago
AWS is gold standard so of course they would support it. Cockroach labs is backed by Google Ventures and run by former Googlers so that explains GCP. Azure may not have the most impressive tech stack, but plenty of non tech reasons for these decisions as well.