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Another option is going full-scale with CockroachDB. We had a Django application backed by PostgreSQL, which we migrated to CockroachDB using their official bac

Another option is going full-scale with CockroachDB. We had a Django application backed by PostgreSQL, which we migrated to CockroachDB using their official backend. The data migration was a pain, but it was still less painful than manually sharding the data or dealing with 3rd party extensions. Since then, we’ve had a few hiccups with autogenerated migration scripts, but overall, the experience has been quite seamless. We weren’t using any advanced PostgreSQL features, so CockroachDB has worked well.

skunkworker 2y ago
Unless their pricing has changed, it’s quite exorbitant when you need a lot of data. To the point that one year of cockroachdb would cost 5x the cost of the server it was running on.
- rednafi 2y ago
  This is still true. I wouldn’t use Cockroach if it were my own business. Also, they don’t offer any free version to try out the product. All you get is a short trial period and that’s it.
  - CharlesW 2y ago
    > Also, they don’t offer any free version to try out the product. The site makes it seems as if I can install CockroachDB on Mac, Linux, or Windows and try it out for as long as I like. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v25.1/install-cockroachdb-linux https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v25.1/install-cockroachdb... Additionally, they claim CockroachDB Cloud is free for use "up to 10 GiB of storage and 50M RUs per organization per month".
    - rednafi 2y ago
      Oh yeah, you can run docker-compose and play with the local version as long as you want. But their cloud offers are limited and quite expensive.
      - Ocha 2y ago
        You can use official binary in production deployment - you just need to manage it yourself like you would manage Postgres.
    - re-thc 2y ago
      > The site makes it seems as if I can install CockroachDB on Mac, Linux, or Windows and try it out for as long as I like. Therare limitations in terms of licenses [0]. [0]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v25.1/licensing-faqs https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v25.1/licensing-faqs
      - benjiro 2y ago
        Licenses are also yearly renewed. Its not like you get one license and can use it forever. No, you need to yearly enter the new license in your instance, if you do not, after 2 weeks it goes into cripple mode (as in, you can not run anything that is not a personal blog). And those free-licenses have this dirty little clause that you are not entitled to a license, they need to APPROVE a free-license. Now that is even more scary. They pull all this because people kept using the free-core version and people simply never upgrade/wanted more. That is why all these changed happened. Coincidentally, the buzz around CRDB has died down to the point that most talks about CRDB are these rare mentions here (even reddit is as good as dead). 98% of CRDB mentioning how great it is, is all origination from CRDBLabs. Do a google and limit in time range, and then go page by page, ... They are a enterprise only company at this point.
    - benjiro 2y ago
      > Additionally, they claim CockroachDB Cloud is free for use "up to 10 GiB of storage and 50M RUs per organization per month". Take in account, that the constant CPU/Mem/Query monitoring that CRDB does, eats up around 20 a 30M RUs per month. There are some people that complained as to why there free instances lost so much capacity. And those RU are not 1:1, like, you do a insert, its 1RU, oooo, no ... Its like 9 to 12RU or something. Its very easy to eat all those RUs on a simply website. Let alone something that needs to scale. Trust me, your better of self deploying but then you enjoy the issue of the new licenses / forced telemetric / forced phone home, or spend 125$+ / vcpu (good luck finding out the price, we only know these numbers from people breaking nda offers). They are very aggressive in sales. Its not worth it to tie your company to a product, that can chance licenses on a whim, that charges Oracle prices (and uses the same tactics). I am very sure that some of their sales staff is ex-Oracle employees. ;)
- CharlesW 2y ago
  I think you're referring to the CockroachDB Cloud DBaaS offering vs. CockroachDB itself, correct?
  - rednafi 2y ago
    Not the parent but yeah, most likely. But then again, you probably don’t want to maintain your own deployment of Cockroach fleet.
levkk 2y ago
I'm glad you brought up the migration, because one of the main goals behind our project is to automate migrating to a sharded deployment. You can think of your DB as the base case (num_shards = 1), and PgDog as the recursive solution.
- rednafi 2y ago
  Automatic data transfer would be super cool to get out of the box. We had a custom multi-tenancy solution for our application that heavily used PostgreSQL schemas. One schema for each customer. It was a pain to get that work with Cockroach since it doesn’t optimize cross schema queries and suggests one DB per customer. This was a deal breaker for us and we had to duplicate data to avoid cross schema queries. Being able to live within Postgres has its advantages.
traceroute66 2y ago
> Another option is going full-scale with CockroachDB Just beware that CockroachDB is not a drop-in replacement for PostgreSQL. Last time I looked it was missing basic stuff. Like stored functions. I don't call stored functions an "advanced feature".
- frollogaston 2y ago
  I also wonder what limitations you get on queries. Cause in Spanner, there's something about cross-directory queries, or Citus can't do cross-shard FKs iirc. There's no magic way to shard a relational DB, you have to deal with it one way or another.
  - vvern 2y ago
    Cockroach really doesn’t have limitations when it comes to queries. It is kinda magic in that regard. The single partition queries are the special case and are treated as rare. Cockroach ranges are quite small compared to other systems (~256MiB).
    - frollogaston 2y ago
      Interesting, I'll have to try it out at some point.
- benjiro 2y ago
  > Just beware that CockroachDB is not a drop-in replacement for PostgreSQL. O, its way worse then that... A ton of small functionality tend to be missing or work differently. Sometimes even small stuff like column[1:2] does not even exist in CRDB and other times its things like ROW LEVEL SECURITY ... you know, something you may want on a mass distributed database then will be use for tenant setups (i hear they are finally going to implement it this year). The main issue is the performance... You are spending close to ~4x the resources on a similar performing setup. And this is a 2x Pgres (sync) vs 3x CRDB (where every node is just a replica). Its not the replication itself but the massive overhead on the raft protocol + the way less optimized query planner. To match Pgres, your required to deploy around 10 a 12 nodes, on hardware that needs about twice the resources. That is the point where CRDB performance on a similar level. The issue is, well, you increase the resources to your Postgresql server and the gap is back. You can scale Postgresql to insane levels with 64, 96 CPUs ... Or imagine, you know, just planning your app in advance in such a way, that you spread your load over multiple Postgresql instances. Rocket science folks ;) CRDB is really fun to watch, the build in GUI, the replication being very visual, but its a resource hog. The storage system (peble) eats a ton of resources to compact the data, when you can simply solve that with a PostgreSQL instance with zfs (with ironically, often better compression). I do not joke when i say, that seeing those step cpu spikes in the night hours of the compacter working, is painful. Even a basic empty CRDB instance, just logging its own usage, runs between 7 to 50% on a quad ARM N1, constantly. PostgreSQL? You do not even know its running. Barely any CPU usage, what memory usage? And we have not talked license/payment issues ... Of "free enterprise" version with FORCED telemetric on, AND your not allowed to hide the server (aka, if it can not call home, it goes into restricted mode in 7 days, with like 50 queries / second ... aka, the same as just shutting down your DB ). By the way, some people reported that its 125+ dollar/vcore payment. Given that even the most basic CRDB gets you 3x instances, with minimum 4 cores ... Do the math. Yea, after 10M income but they chance their licenses every few years, so who knows next year or the year after that. Interesting product, shitty sales company behind it. I am more interested to see when the postgresql storage extension orioledb comes out, so it solve the main issue that prevents postgresql scaling even more, namely the write/vacuum issue. And ofcourse a better solution to upgrade postgresql versions, there CRDB is leaps and bound better.

skunkworker 2y ago

Unless their pricing has changed, it’s quite exorbitant when you need a lot of data. To the point that one year of cockroachdb would cost 5x the cost of the server it was running on.

rednafi 2y ago
This is still true. I wouldn’t use Cockroach if it were my own business. Also, they don’t offer any free version to try out the product. All you get is a short trial period and that’s it.
- CharlesW 2y ago
  > Also, they don’t offer any free version to try out the product. The site makes it seems as if I can install CockroachDB on Mac, Linux, or Windows and try it out for as long as I like. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v25.1/install-cockroachdb-linux https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v25.1/install-cockroachdb... Additionally, they claim CockroachDB Cloud is free for use "up to 10 GiB of storage and 50M RUs per organization per month".
  - rednafi 2y ago
    Oh yeah, you can run docker-compose and play with the local version as long as you want. But their cloud offers are limited and quite expensive.
    - Ocha 2y ago
      You can use official binary in production deployment - you just need to manage it yourself like you would manage Postgres.
  - re-thc 2y ago
    > The site makes it seems as if I can install CockroachDB on Mac, Linux, or Windows and try it out for as long as I like. Therare limitations in terms of licenses [0]. [0]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v25.1/licensing-faqs https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v25.1/licensing-faqs
    - benjiro 2y ago
      Licenses are also yearly renewed. Its not like you get one license and can use it forever. No, you need to yearly enter the new license in your instance, if you do not, after 2 weeks it goes into cripple mode (as in, you can not run anything that is not a personal blog). And those free-licenses have this dirty little clause that you are not entitled to a license, they need to APPROVE a free-license. Now that is even more scary. They pull all this because people kept using the free-core version and people simply never upgrade/wanted more. That is why all these changed happened. Coincidentally, the buzz around CRDB has died down to the point that most talks about CRDB are these rare mentions here (even reddit is as good as dead). 98% of CRDB mentioning how great it is, is all origination from CRDBLabs. Do a google and limit in time range, and then go page by page, ... They are a enterprise only company at this point.
  - benjiro 2y ago
    > Additionally, they claim CockroachDB Cloud is free for use "up to 10 GiB of storage and 50M RUs per organization per month". Take in account, that the constant CPU/Mem/Query monitoring that CRDB does, eats up around 20 a 30M RUs per month. There are some people that complained as to why there free instances lost so much capacity. And those RU are not 1:1, like, you do a insert, its 1RU, oooo, no ... Its like 9 to 12RU or something. Its very easy to eat all those RUs on a simply website. Let alone something that needs to scale. Trust me, your better of self deploying but then you enjoy the issue of the new licenses / forced telemetric / forced phone home, or spend 125$+ / vcpu (good luck finding out the price, we only know these numbers from people breaking nda offers). They are very aggressive in sales. Its not worth it to tie your company to a product, that can chance licenses on a whim, that charges Oracle prices (and uses the same tactics). I am very sure that some of their sales staff is ex-Oracle employees. ;)
CharlesW 2y ago
I think you're referring to the CockroachDB Cloud DBaaS offering vs. CockroachDB itself, correct?
- rednafi 2y ago
  Not the parent but yeah, most likely. But then again, you probably don’t want to maintain your own deployment of Cockroach fleet.

levkk 2y ago

I'm glad you brought up the migration, because one of the main goals behind our project is to automate migrating to a sharded deployment. You can think of your DB as the base case (num_shards = 1), and PgDog as the recursive solution.

rednafi 2y ago
Automatic data transfer would be super cool to get out of the box. We had a custom multi-tenancy solution for our application that heavily used PostgreSQL schemas. One schema for each customer. It was a pain to get that work with Cockroach since it doesn’t optimize cross schema queries and suggests one DB per customer. This was a deal breaker for us and we had to duplicate data to avoid cross schema queries. Being able to live within Postgres has its advantages.

traceroute66 2y ago

> Another option is going full-scale with CockroachDB Just beware that CockroachDB is not a drop-in replacement for PostgreSQL. Last time I looked it was missing basic stuff. Like stored functions. I don't call stored functions an "advanced feature".

frollogaston 2y ago
I also wonder what limitations you get on queries. Cause in Spanner, there's something about cross-directory queries, or Citus can't do cross-shard FKs iirc. There's no magic way to shard a relational DB, you have to deal with it one way or another.
- vvern 2y ago
  Cockroach really doesn’t have limitations when it comes to queries. It is kinda magic in that regard. The single partition queries are the special case and are treated as rare. Cockroach ranges are quite small compared to other systems (~256MiB).
  - frollogaston 2y ago
    Interesting, I'll have to try it out at some point.
benjiro 2y ago
> Just beware that CockroachDB is not a drop-in replacement for PostgreSQL. O, its way worse then that... A ton of small functionality tend to be missing or work differently. Sometimes even small stuff like column[1:2] does not even exist in CRDB and other times its things like ROW LEVEL SECURITY ... you know, something you may want on a mass distributed database then will be use for tenant setups (i hear they are finally going to implement it this year). The main issue is the performance... You are spending close to ~4x the resources on a similar performing setup. And this is a 2x Pgres (sync) vs 3x CRDB (where every node is just a replica). Its not the replication itself but the massive overhead on the raft protocol + the way less optimized query planner. To match Pgres, your required to deploy around 10 a 12 nodes, on hardware that needs about twice the resources. That is the point where CRDB performance on a similar level. The issue is, well, you increase the resources to your Postgresql server and the gap is back. You can scale Postgresql to insane levels with 64, 96 CPUs ... Or imagine, you know, just planning your app in advance in such a way, that you spread your load over multiple Postgresql instances. Rocket science folks ;) CRDB is really fun to watch, the build in GUI, the replication being very visual, but its a resource hog. The storage system (peble) eats a ton of resources to compact the data, when you can simply solve that with a PostgreSQL instance with zfs (with ironically, often better compression). I do not joke when i say, that seeing those step cpu spikes in the night hours of the compacter working, is painful. Even a basic empty CRDB instance, just logging its own usage, runs between 7 to 50% on a quad ARM N1, constantly. PostgreSQL? You do not even know its running. Barely any CPU usage, what memory usage? And we have not talked license/payment issues ... Of "free enterprise" version with FORCED telemetric on, AND your not allowed to hide the server (aka, if it can not call home, it goes into restricted mode in 7 days, with like 50 queries / second ... aka, the same as just shutting down your DB ). By the way, some people reported that its 125+ dollar/vcore payment. Given that even the most basic CRDB gets you 3x instances, with minimum 4 cores ... Do the math. Yea, after 10M income but they chance their licenses every few years, so who knows next year or the year after that. Interesting product, shitty sales company behind it. I am more interested to see when the postgresql storage extension orioledb comes out, so it solve the main issue that prevents postgresql scaling even more, namely the write/vacuum issue. And ofcourse a better solution to upgrade postgresql versions, there CRDB is leaps and bound better.