[neilhan]

Disclaimer: I am from PingCAP, the company built TiDB

CockroachDB is well suited for applications that require reliable, available, and correct data, and millisecond response times, regardless of scale, and belongs to the category of NewSQL, which promises to combine benefits from RDBMS (strong consistency) with benefits from NoSQL (scalability); it mainly achieves this through new architecture patterns and efficient SQL storage engines. TiDB and CockroachDB are a few of the leading NewSQL databases. Each database implementation has its own take on how to ensure strong consistency with a scalable architecture.

The following situations are some hints you may consider for a switch,

1. RDBMS is becoming the performance bottleneck of your backend service

2. The amount of data stored in the database is overwhelming

3. You want to do some complex queries on large amount of data that cannot fit in one machine without manual sharding

4. Your application needs a full ACID transaction for data distributed on multiple machines.

There are multiple choices for NewSQL too, engineers are always trying to compare TiDB and CockroachDB, here’s some considerations before you decide.

TiDB is compatible with the MySQL protocol while CockroachDB is compatible with PostgreSQL. You can directly connect to TiDB server using any MySQL client and benefit from the MySQL ecosystem. Plus TiDB is well adopted and trusted by 1000+ large scale Internet companies and banks.

Currently, CockroachDB is not suitable for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) while TiDB is a Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) database that supports both OLTP (Online Transactional Processing) and OLAP workloads. So with TiDB, a typical ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process that moves data to a different database for analysis is no longer required, enabling you to create new values for your users, easier and faster.

Hope the above can help you a bit.

[lokiju]

Thanks, very helpful.

I have a feeling these technologies will be much more mainstream in 2-3 years

[neilhan]

No problem at all:)

Indeed! With the current situation going on, the digitalisation accelerated, and the dataset is moving to a large scale, we see a huge demand of services like this.