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CockroachDB beta-20161013

jepsen.io

31–40 of 213 posts

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#31

CockroachDB might be the worst product name I've come across. I get it; cockroaches are extremely hardy, but they're also much more strongly associated with uncleanliness and disease. EDIT: Also, cockroaches are BUGS! Bugs cause problems in computer systems.

I think it's the most memorable database name I've seen. So at least it has that going for it.

Agreed, they can change it if they ever get big enough. But before that more memorable brand is going to make it feel more trustworthy than the competition.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#32

> Should the clock offset between two nodes grow too large, transactions will no longer be consistent and all bets are off. A concern I have is that there could be datacorruption in this context, no? It sounds like on a per cluster basis, i.e. Same Raft cluster, there is a strict serializability guarantee. But without linearalizability system wide, you could end up with data corruption on multi-keyspace writes.

If I understood correctly, nodes get killed if they drift outside the max time offset tolerance.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#33
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a native English speaker and have troubles pronouncing "cockroach". In my view the naming is rather unfortunate.

Do you find it easier to pronounce "postgres"?

Not him, but as a native spanish speaker "postgres" rolls of the tongue more easily than "cockroachdb" or just "cockroach".

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#34

"For instance, on a cluster of five m3.large nodes, an even mixture of processes performing single-row inserts and selects over a few hundred rows pushed ~40 inserts and ~20 reads per second (steady-state)." Wow, that's...not fast.

Even if they manage to multiply this by 100 on the final release, it's still way weaker than a regular sql db. I hope they have another selling point than performance.

Horizontal scaleability might be one.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they manage to multiply this by 100 on the final release, it's still way weaker than a regular sql db. I hope they have another selling point than performance.

Horizontal scaleability might be one.

But why scale something when you can just run one postgres instance and provide 10000x the performance?

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#37

Could the name actually slow the project's momentum? I only recently read some cool things about CDB and wondered if I could have been subconsciously skipping articles about it for deep seeded reasons like http://bbc.com/future/story/20140918-the-reality-about-roach... Of course anything good may eventually rise to success on its merits, but in case I'm not the only one with a subconscious aversion maybe the info bel…

to me it's not a deeply-seeded reason, it's just when I hear cutesy-sounding names I just don't take them seriously. They sound like the latest, hipster thing that's going to be in-bloom for a (figurative) week or two until the next cutesy thing steals everyone's attention. Even the language Pony has a mildly off-putting name (to me) despite hearing people rave about it. Couch DB ? What the hell does that mean ?

I admit it's a bias of mine and I could be losing out on learning amazing tools. But even non-profit, standardized languages and tools still have a brand name and image.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horizontal scaleability might be one.

But why scale something when you can just run one postgres instance and provide 10000x the performance?

My though exactly. It's already the case with faster DB. E.G: most projects my customers make me work on will never need scaling on multiple instances. They run really fast on a single postgres instance.

One had some perf issues.

First he just moved the DB to avoid having it on the same machine as the web server. Saved him a year.

Then as the user base grew, he just bought a bigger server for the db.

Right now it works really fast for 400k u/d, and there are still 2 offers of servers more powerful that the current one he has. By the time he needs to buy them, 2 new more incredible offers will probably exist. Which is a joke because more traffic means he has more money anyway.

Having a cluster of nodes to scale is a lot of work. So unless you have 100 millions users doing crazy things, what's the point ?

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#39
post #13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to emphasize that: a.) this is a beta product where the team has been focusing on completeness and correctness before performance b.) I was testing Cockroach from August through October--Cockroach Labs has put a good deal of work into performance in the last three months, but that work hasn't been merged into mainline yet. I expect things should be a good deal faster by 1.0. c.) Jepsen does some intention…

They need to be at least 1000x to 10,000x faster on the read side though

I'm a little confused about how read speed is 2x slower than write speed. With respect to 'correctness', you're drifting into pyrrhic victory or 'not even wrong' territory at that point.

When there are basic expectations of behavior that aren't being met, many of us would reject the idea that this code is 'correct'.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#40

Could the name actually slow the project's momentum? I only recently read some cool things about CDB and wondered if I could have been subconsciously skipping articles about it for deep seeded reasons like http://bbc.com/future/story/20140918-the-reality-about-roach... Of course anything good may eventually rise to success on its merits, but in case I'm not the only one with a subconscious aversion maybe the info bel…

I agree completely. I love reading about databases, but apparently have been skipping reading about CockroachDB for that same reason subconsciously. I took a deep dive the other day and was amazed that I've seen the name dozens of times and have never bothered to ask what was special about it. It really is a fascinating database.

No, you have not been skipping it subconsciously or seeing it more often, than others, you just feel like you did. People actually have an availability bias [1] that clouds their judgement about unusual things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

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