Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CockroachDB beta-20161013

jepsen.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 213 posts

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#61

Post by SilasX »

digler999 wrote: post #37
WhitneyLand wrote: post #24

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 ad…

I know that was rhetorical, but Couch is connotationally neutral AFAIK, and comes from "cluster of unreliable commodity hardware".[1]

At least, it's miles ahead of Cockroach or Rust or even Mongo.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CouchDB#History

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#62

Post by SilasX »

huehehue wrote: post #52
digler999 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ad…

Ah yes, let's not forget the solid branding behind some of Adobe's work: https://pig.apache.org/ https://hive.apache.org/ (Look at the anguish in this creature's face) http://hadoop.apache.org/

Wait, is hive supposed to look like some elephant-bee hybrid?

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#63

Post by theptip »

chillydawg wrote: post #35
AsyncAwait wrote: post #34

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?

If your dataset fits comfortably on one postgres instance, and will continue to do so for your current architectural planning time horizon, then you have little need to use CockroachDB / Spanner.

These databases are designed for use-cases which require the consistency of a relational database, but cannot fit on a single instance.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#64

Post by [deleted] »

sametmax wrote: post #38
chillydawg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

[deleted]

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#66

Post by ohstopitu »

CDB is a really cool db for the time I've been playing with it (just a few months I think).

That said, I'd really appreciate if they'd launch a hosted DBaaS. By that I mean, more in line with dynamodb or documentdb instead of say MySQL on AWS for example.

I know it's on their timeline, but dbs generally get selected during the start of the projects and unless absolutely necessary, companies don't want to change dbs.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#67

Post by flyingramen »

chillydawg wrote: post #35
AsyncAwait wrote: post #34

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?

Your one machine's disk fails and you'll lose data if you have anything other than synchronous replication. And once you have synchronous replication let's hope it is on at least a different rack if in the same data-center. Preferably in a different geographical region actually. And now you no longer have "really fast" QPS.

All this assumes you have only so much data that can fit in one machine. If that's not the case you're in need of a database that spans more than one machine.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#68

Post by sametmax »

hinkley wrote: post #49
chillydawg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What I found out the hard way is that there's a qualitative difference between 'can' and 'must' here that causes a lot of problems with the development cycle. When the project can no longer fit onto a developer's box it changes a bunch of dynamics and often not for the better. Lots of regressions slip in, because developers start to believe that the glitches they see are caused by other people touching things they sh…

Plus I found that people using MongoDB tend to not formalize their data schema because the tool doesn't enforce it. But they do have a data schema.

Only:

- it's implicit, and you have to inspect the db and the code to understand it.

- there is no single source of truth, so any changes better be backed up by unit tests. And training is awkward. If some fields/values are rarely use, you can easily end up not knowing about them while "peeking at the data".

- the constraints are delegated to dev, so code making checks is scattered all around the place. Which makes consistency suffers. I almost ALWAYS find duplicate or invalid entries in any mongo storage I have to work on. And of course again, changes and training are a pain. "Is this field mandatory ?" is a question I asked way to often in those mongo gigs.

Things like redis suffer less from this because they are so simple it's hard to get wrong.

But mongo is a great software. It's powerful. You can use it for virtually anything, whatever the size, quantity, or shape. And so people do it.

The funny thing is, the best MongoDb users I met are coming from an SQL background. They no the pros and the cons, and use the flexibility of Mongo without making a mess.

But people often choose mongo as a way to avoid learning how to deal with DB.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#69

Post by irfansharif »

I'm disappointed with the commentary here, I for one would think the discussions around building a distributed system with the consistency guarantees claimed here would be far more interesting than the name of said system.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#70

Post by sametmax »

theptip wrote: post #63
chillydawg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If your dataset fits comfortably on one postgres instance, and will continue to do so for your current architectural planning time horizon, then you have little need to use CockroachDB / Spanner. These databases are designed for use-cases which require the consistency of a relational database, but cannot fit on a single instance.

Right now not really. Cockroach perf don't allow you do have a big dataset given the performances.
Post reply on HN