CockroachDB Interactive, D3-Powered Simulations

[muxator]

CockroachDB fares well on the distributed side of the spectrum, and thus shows all the best properties of this kind of systems: replication, resiliency, horizontal scalability, modern ops experience.

This is no small feat, and - personally - I am sold on it. Yet, looking at its benchmarks (pre 2.0), and knowing how carelessly some enterprise software is written, how would I convince a pointy haired boss to leave the practically monolithic mega-pumped Oracle RAC server he is accustomed to, and go down the distributed route?

[itgoon]

You've to appeal to their spreadsheets. Generally, lower costs.

If Oracle is well-established, it's going to be tough. It isn't just the cost of Oracle and doing business with them, it's the cost of all the work associated with making the transition. Code-rewrites, retraining ops, and so on.

If there's an opportunity for a greenfield, small project that would benefit from having a distributed backend then try that. Be prepared to show that it's not just low-cost, but it is easier to implement.

[scarmig]

First things first, you'll want a DB that doesn't have cockroach in the name.

I'm only slightly kidding.

[erikrothoff]

We currently host our "monolithic" MySQL database on a fairly large VPS on Linode. At least on Linode, to increase storage space you need to double the capacity of the server, thus doubling the cost for each scale up. The idea of simple scaling horizontally is one I've dreamt of for a long time. However it just seems that the problem is not the monolithicness, it's the cost of storage. If we were to use CockroachDB with redundancy the cost would be equivalent to just using Amazon Aurora, which is fully managed!

That being said I'm very excited about CockroachDB. Cassandra did not live up to the hype for me because of the complexity and now that DataStax has split up with Apache in a weird way, it feels like a less appealing option.

[dx034]

Would be great to have cloud VPS without RAID for exactly those cases where redundancy is handled a level above. Could probably be offered much cheaper than current VPS.

[bsg75]

> Cassandra did not live up to the hype for me because of the complexity

Which complexity are you referring to, specifically where CRDB has a better approach?

Interested as we are evaluating both.

[zapita]

Is CockroachDB ready for production? If so what's the largest known production deployment?

[manigandham]

It's been production ready for a year, although v2 will add some nice functionality like JSON.

You can check their customers page: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/customers/

[Exuma]

I never understand what goes through some people's head when they name things............

[steve918]

This comes up every single time they are mentioned. Fighting an up hill battle, but they're committed sticking with the poor choice of name. Also always someone who wants to explain why it's called that like it's not obvious. Doesn't make it a good name for a product you're trying to sell people.

[danudey]

Presumably the idea that when a nuclear war happens, only CockroachDB will withstand the failure cases involved.

[Cieplak]

What kind of consistency guarantees can this database provide? Does it support some type of lock so it can be used to give real-time account balances and prevent overdrawing an account?

[thesandlord]

Strong Consistency: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/strong-consistency...

[tty7]

i am thinking about using cockroachdb to power something like LDAP.

but the CIO said no because it has "cockroach" in the name and no one would sign off.

should i just do it anyway?

[karlding]

You may want to tell your CIO to check out BikeshedDB [0], which is built exactly for this use case.

[0] https://github.com/tschottdorf/bikesheddb