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CockroachDB 1.0

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB 1.0

#161

Post by arjunnarayan »

newman314 wrote: post #158
rodionos wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When a node exceeds the clock offset threshold, it will automatically shut down to prevent anomalies. If you're planning to run on VMware, be prepared to handle rather dramatic system clock shifts. I've seen shifts of up to 5 minutes during heavy backup windows. Not all customers might be willing to have their nodes go down due to system clock / NTP issues.

Do people not run NTP on their VMs? Or are you saying that you see heavy clock skew despite having NTP in place?

The latter. NTP only checks and corrects clock offsets every so often. If the "hardware"[1] clock undergoes offset shifts at random times because of VM pauses this won't get fixed immediately until the next NTP sync.

This gets exacerbated in cloud settings where VMs get moved between physical machines, or racks since now it's not just the pause, its that the clock is now pointing to a new hardware time source. [1] in quotes since it's viewed as a single piece of hardware to the software inside the VM.

Re: CockroachDB 1.0

#162

Post by [deleted] »

newman314 wrote: post #158
rodionos wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When a node exceeds the clock offset threshold, it will automatically shut down to prevent anomalies. If you're planning to run on VMware, be prepared to handle rather dramatic system clock shifts. I've seen shifts of up to 5 minutes during heavy backup windows. Not all customers might be willing to have their nodes go down due to system clock / NTP issues.

Do people not run NTP on their VMs? Or are you saying that you see heavy clock skew despite having NTP in place?

[deleted]

Re: CockroachDB 1.0

#163

Post by hd4 »

daliwali wrote: post #156

CockroachDB looks like a great alternative to PostgreSQL, congrats to the team for doing so much in such a short time. The wire protocol is compatible with Postgres, which allows re-using battle-tested Postgres clients. However it's a non-starter for my use case since it lacks array columns, which Postgres supports [0]. I also make use of fairly recent SQL features introduced in Postgres 9.4, but I'm not sure if ther…

I'm basically here to ask a similar question, whether this is aimed as an modern alternative to Postgresql, since they don't clearly state this on the OP news announcement.

Re: CockroachDB 1.0

#164

Post by jordanlewis »

daliwali wrote: post #156

CockroachDB looks like a great alternative to PostgreSQL, congrats to the team for doing so much in such a short time. The wire protocol is compatible with Postgres, which allows re-using battle-tested Postgres clients. However it's a non-starter for my use case since it lacks array columns, which Postgres supports [0]. I also make use of fairly recent SQL features introduced in Postgres 9.4, but I'm not sure if ther…

I'm an engineer on the SQL team at CockroachDB. We're very aware of our missing support for array column types - and in fact beginning to add support for arrays is one of my team's priorities for the next release cycle.

What kind of other recent SQL features introduced in Postgres 9.4 do you use? Postgres has a ton of features, as I'm sure you're aware, and while we strive for wire compatibility with Postgres it's not a goal of ours to implement support for every Postgres feature out there.

Re: CockroachDB 1.0

#165

Post by steveklabnik »

arjunnarayan wrote: post #122
Svenskunganka wrote: post #114

Pardon the nature of my question, but I'm really interested in what your experience has been so far building a database with Go? Has its runtime (the GC for example) posed any issues for you so far? Looking at other RDBMS's, languages with manual memory management like C or C++ seems to be the go-to choice, so what were the reasons you chose Go? I'm quite frankly amazed that Go's runtime is able to support a database…

We have a post on why we chose Go, from a year and a half ago: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/why-go-was-the-right-choi... More technically, here's a somewhat random set of thoughts on the subject: The Go GC is performant and predictable, unlike the JVM GC. We do have some very memory-allocation-conscious code patterns to minimize the performance impact of working in a garbage-collected language runtime, but in t…

If you have a moment, "tooling" is pretty vague; which kinds of tools were you worried about with Rust?

(Also, congrats on the 1.0!)

Re: CockroachDB 1.0

#166

Post by beamatronic »

retox wrote: post #125
jondubois wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the creator of a moderately popular open source project, I can attest that the name of the project is very important. A common problem for open source projects is that the name is not recognizable enough (e.g. too technical) or too generic (e.g. a simple English word which makes is heard to search on Google). In this case the name evokes negative emotions of fear and disgust which are not what you want to associat…

I wondered for a time if the action movie XXX[0] chose that name because it would be very hard to search online. [0] http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0295701/

Back in 2000, I used to enjoy an online streaming radio station called echo.com, and as a sort of reward for listening, you could earn Amazon gift certificates.

I tried googling for "Amazon echo gift certificates" but I couldn't quite find what I was looking for.

I miss AltaVista.

Re: CockroachDB 1.0

#167

Post by beamatronic »

bogomipz wrote: post #101
anthonylebrun wrote: post #56

Since there's a little side riff about the name going on I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents. Personally I love the name. I think it does a great job of conveying the spirit of the project and provides unlimited pun opportunities. Plus it's memorable, just like a real life roach encounter. Unfortunately I'm sure some people will discriminate against your DB on the basis of name alone. That's ludicrous, but that's our s…

I agree with all your points. That being said MongoDB, Aerospike and Hadoop have all gotten good traction even with their slightly silly names.

To me, cockroaches are such an unbelievably negative association that I don't think I could get over the name and work with this product, because I wouldn't want to be saying cockroach all the time.

Same thing if your database was called BedBug.

Re: CockroachDB 1.0

#168

Post by SilasX »

newsat13 wrote: post #160

Very disappointed with HN turning into a 4chan/reddit style trolling board about the name. Guys, we get it that you don't like the name. Can we please stop bike shedding and move on? The people at cockroachdb have obviously seen all your messages but decided it's worth keeping the name. What more is there to talk about? Why not talk about the relative technical merits of this DB?

It's not bikeshedding when the bikeshed's color will actually have concrete effects on adoption. Most people -- i.e. in procurement, management, finance, and others you need to appeal to -- don't want anything to do with cockroaches. The idea disgusts them at a gut level, not something you can talk away.

HN users are giving vital advice, for free. Those who ignore it will have only themselves to blame.

As I say every time this comes up, would you be so dismissive about critics of naming a product PubesDB? Or GonorrheaDB? Or [n-word]DB? Then you agree that disgust-invoking connotations of the name matter, and we're just haggling over the details.

Ubuntu, Mongo, Swagger (edit: Hadoop also) ... they're weird, sure, but they don't evoke the visceral feeling of disgust that cockroaches do.

Re: CockroachDB 1.0

#169

Post by thraway2016 »

SilasX wrote: post #168
newsat13 wrote: post #160

Very disappointed with HN turning into a 4chan/reddit style trolling board about the name. Guys, we get it that you don't like the name. Can we please stop bike shedding and move on? The people at cockroachdb have obviously seen all your messages but decided it's worth keeping the name. What more is there to talk about? Why not talk about the relative technical merits of this DB?

It's not bikeshedding when the bikeshed's color will actually have concrete effects on adoption. Most people -- i.e. in procurement, management, finance, and others you need to appeal to -- don't want anything to do with cockroaches. The idea disgusts them at a gut level, not something you can talk away. HN users are giving vital advice, for free. Those who ignore it will have only themselves to blame. As I say every…

procurement, management, finance, and others you need to appeal to

They don't need to appeal to any of these suits. Just the technical decision-makers, whose express job it is to choose solutions on their technical merits, not their spurious emotional reactions.

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