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We Changed YugaByte DB Licensing to Apache 2.0

blog.yugabyte.com

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Re: We Changed YugaByte DB Licensing to Apache 2.0

#4
post #2

How does YugaByte compare to CockroachDB?

YugaByte product manager here -- have documented the answer to your question [1] As you can see, there are many similarities but there are also a few important differences such as depth of PostgreSQL compatibility (YB reuses PostgreSQL query layer while CRDB is a re-implementation) and latency/throughput observed for modern OLTP workloads.

[1] https://docs.yugabyte.com/latest/comparisons/cockroachdb/

Re: We Changed YugaByte DB Licensing to Apache 2.0

#5
post #2

How does YugaByte compare to CockroachDB?

There's a feature matrix here [1] comparing YugaByte to CRDB, TiDB, Aurora, CosmosDB, Spanner, MongoDB, FoundationDB, Cassandra and Dynamo. No idea about performance characteristics though.

[1] https://docs.yugabyte.com/latest/comparisons/

edit: there is a relatively recent blogpost comparing the two here: https://blog.yugabyte.com/yugabyte-db-vs-cockroachdb-perform...

Key summary from the post:

In a nutshell, YugaByte DB delivers an average of 3.5x higher throughput and 3x lower latency compared to CockroachDB. Following are the detailed performance characteristics at scale (millions of rows) for internet-scale transactional workloads:

5x more insert throughput, 9x faster 4x more query throughput, 3x faster 4x more distributed transactions throughput In addition, YugaByte DB offers additional features such as read replicas (for timeline-consistent, low-latency reads from the local region) and automatic data expiry (by setting a TTL at table level or row level).

Obviously to be taken with a grain of salt as with all benchmarks doing head-to-head comparisons.

Re: We Changed YugaByte DB Licensing to Apache 2.0

#7
post #3

So are they not worried AWS will offer yugabyte as a service and edge them out of their own market? Maybe AWS wouldn't because of Aurora. And I guess the other's aren't large enough to matter.

Quoting the article,

“competition from AWS is simply the price to pay for developing OSS. Restrictive licensing including AGPL can slow down AWS but cannot stop it so the real impact of such licensing is lower user adoption. (...) this means that a commercial OSS company now has to compete with AWS on the merits of an exceptional DBaaS experience and not on the merits of the core OSS DB.”

Re: We Changed YugaByte DB Licensing to Apache 2.0

#8
post #3

So are they not worried AWS will offer yugabyte as a service and edge them out of their own market? Maybe AWS wouldn't because of Aurora. And I guess the other's aren't large enough to matter.

One way for YB to fight off the competition from AWS would be to include a clause that any forks of the DB should always be in sync with the upstream(master developed by YB), so hypothetically speaking this would mean companies that are using the AWS YB could always have the freedom to switch to using the OSS YB and only risk loosing the features that AWS has contributed to its fork and might actually force the OSS to keep up.

So goodluck YB.

Re: We Changed YugaByte DB Licensing to Apache 2.0

#9
post #8
post #3

So are they not worried AWS will offer yugabyte as a service and edge them out of their own market? Maybe AWS wouldn't because of Aurora. And I guess the other's aren't large enough to matter.

One way for YB to fight off the competition from AWS would be to include a clause that any forks of the DB should always be in sync with the upstream(master developed by YB), so hypothetically speaking this would mean companies that are using the AWS YB could always have the freedom to switch to using the OSS YB and only risk loosing the features that AWS has contributed to its fork and might actually force the OSS t…

(founder/cto of YugaByte)

This is a very insightful suggestion, thanks for raising that! We had considered many of these variants until finally, we concluded that fully open is the best way.

PostgreSQL (which is the database on fire right now) got to this spot by being fully open and permissive - and embracing all forms of competition. In fact, PostgreSQL got rewritten from Lisp to C (which begs an interesting question - what is a database? The code or the query language? Anyway I digress).

We felt if we want to build something as foundational as PostgreSQL for the cloud, then we need to be as open.

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