It probably scales but how is the performance? If I need to load a couple billion rows and do a dozen joins in some analytics, is that one machine, a dozen, or 100? Is it more for web apps, analytics, or what? When would I consider switching from e.g. Postgres to CockroachDB?
[Cockroach Labs engineer here] For just a couple billion rows and a dozen joins, a single node will suffice (with the caveat that you really want at least 3 nodes because CockroachDB is built for replication and fault-tolerance and you're not getting that with a single node cluster), but you'll get linear speedup as you add more machines. Your performance on a single node should be on the same order of magnitude as d…
On the feature FAQ joins are describe as 'functional' which doesn't inspire a lot of confidence but maybe it's just a perception thing. What exactly does functional mean?
A SQL db without joins sounds a lot like just a NOSQL db with a familiar query dialect.