[zachmu]

Sometimes it's a reasonable choice to pay for software, especially if you're a large company that can easily afford it. It's not like "just using postgres" in a manner similar to Cockroach's capabilities is trivial, building your own solution also has a whole set of risks.

If you're absolutely opposed to ever paying for a software solution, then sure, avoid commercial projects. I'm happy to spend my (company's) money on useful software.

[vdfs]

Without marketing bs, what's something that can be done only with Cockroach and not postgres or other truly-OSS alternatives? I'm curios because I've been reading news about it forever but never had the chance to work with it

[zachmu]

Think of it as a replacement for spanner with a postgres frontend. It's about global availability and replication without application-level sharding.

[vvern]

Transactional workloads over datasets in the single digit petabytes.