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CockroachDB 19.2

cockroachlabs.com

31–40 of 63 posts

Re: CockroachDB 19.2

#31
post #28

Heh, they didn't seem to test their University website[1] before publising it. There is a gaping: Additionally, paste this code immediately after the opening tag: In the source code. That “ ” isn't escaped either, which makes the whole thing borked-up. This is why we need XHTML. [1] https://university.cockroachlabs.com/catalog

Thank you, we didn't get that resolved beforehand. Should be fixed now.

Wow, that was quick. Thank you :-)

Re: CockroachDB 19.2

#33

Can we actually backup the database with the community edition yet? Last I checked this was impossible.

Backups are still an enterprise feature but doing a dump is still supported in the non paid version.

Can we lock a replica for writing (stop syncing) and do a disk-level snapshot of the disk that it's running on? As a way of doing backups?

Agree with the OP, no way of doing backups is kind of a dealbreaker even for hobby use :/

Re: CockroachDB 19.2

#34
Awesome to see a new release! We've followed Cockroach for a while, would be a good fit four our workload.

However, I think it's sad that their pricing is so opaque.

Even after a few emails back and forth with their sales people it still feels fairly arbitrary, and since it's not transparent we don't know if they're just making numbers up based on what they think we're willing to pay.

I find this sales-tactic off-putting. In theory it allow them to "not leave any money on the table", as they would probably frame it, but I'm curious how many deals they will lose simply because people don't want to be held hostage, or don't want to put up with the sales-hassle.

With AWS and Google Cloud (their main competitors), we know that prices won't be jacked-up.

———

An interesting example of this mistake is Mapbox.

They had a limited free tier, where most use-cases would be "talk to sales for pricing". We had a frustrating 2 months talking with their sales people, finally getting a reasonable deal. But we were very close to just ditching them for Google Maps (even though I liked Mapbox product better and was willing to pay more for it), just because the price negotiation and all the cheap sales-tactics was so time-consuming.

Then, 6 months later, Mapbox CEO posted this blog post:

https://blog.mapbox.com/new-pricing-46b7c26166e7

    [excerpt, from Mapbox CEO announcing pricing/sales rethink]
    
    How we price our tools has a significant impact on how those tools get used 
    and what gets built with Mapbox. We were pricing some of our APIs wrong — 
    making things confusing and restrictive. Rolling out new pricing took 
    close to five months; informed by the stories of our builders 
    whose curiosity and insight gave us a lot of honest feedback. 
    
    Here’s what we were doing wrong:
    - Unpredictable pricing at scale
    - Development slowed by price modeling and negotiating volumes
    - Unintuitive billing units
    - Hard to compare measurement to our friends at Google
    - Confusion around when commercial plans are needed

    Our goal with this change is to reduce the friction to build with 
    our tools and to allow our team to help developers use maps and locations
    more creatively. As we designed this new pricing, we kept our key 
    pricing principles in mind:
    
    - Predictable and aligned with metrics our customers already measure
    - Clearly defined discount tiers as businesses scale with no surprises
    - Product usage measured in a way that’s clear to all involved
    - Generous free tier to encourage building and make it easier to get started
I experienced all those downsides, which almost pushed us to leave Mapbox, so very happy to see them reconsider (for their own sake).

Perhaps CockroachDB could unlock similar benefits by making their pricing/sales more open.

Re: CockroachDB 19.2

#35
post #9

Waiting for the comments about the name. On a more serious note, looking forward to trying this new release out. I found previous versions really straightforward to get up and running with on Kubernetes but performance was always lacklustre.

You can find our more recent performance numbers on https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v19.2/performance.html

Is that saying that you are comparing Cockroach running on 81 c5d.9xls vs Aurora running on 2 r3.8xls? I get that part of what you are trying to show is that Cockroach will scale far past what any single-master system can, but it feels pretty lame to run a test comparing transaction throughput on 2900 cores vs 64 cores and a data set size comparison on 81 hosts vs 2.

The sysbench metrics seems like a much fairer comparison, and CockroachDB looks great in those metrics as well, so I don't really get why you are leading with a comparison that looks really sketchy at first glance.

Re: CockroachDB 19.2

#36

Pro-tip: if at all possible do not run this on top of Ceph. Bare metal SSDs or VMs with SSDs.

That's normal advice for any database or system that does it's own data replication. Having multiple distributed storage layers never works out well.

Re: CockroachDB 19.2

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backups are still an enterprise feature but doing a dump is still supported in the non paid version.

Yeah, that is not a real solution for a database of any real size, which is the only reason to use CockroachDB in the first place.

I know. It’s a bummer.

I’ve not tried to do block level backups for our setup in production.

Re: CockroachDB 19.2

#38
post #27

Pro-tip: if at all possible do not run this on top of Ceph. Bare metal SSDs or VMs with SSDs.

From experience I take it? Was Ceph running on any of those?

Yes it is how we run it in production and sadly it’s not great.

On my own laptop I’ve found it to be maybe 85% or so as quick as normal single mode Postgres. That said things aren’t great when the storage layer is doing consensus and replication and then the database is as well.

Re: CockroachDB 19.2

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backups are still an enterprise feature but doing a dump is still supported in the non paid version.

Can we lock a replica for writing (stop syncing) and do a disk-level snapshot of the disk that it's running on? As a way of doing backups? Agree with the OP, no way of doing backups is kind of a dealbreaker even for hobby use :/

Problem is not every node has all data from all nodes so you couldn’t say take one node offline and do a block level backup of that node’s storage.

Re: CockroachDB 19.2

#40

Awesome to see a new release! We've followed Cockroach for a while, would be a good fit four our workload. However, I think it's sad that their pricing is so opaque. Even after a few emails back and forth with their sales people it still feels fairly arbitrary, and since it's not transparent we don't know if they're just making numbers up based on what they think we're willing to pay. I find this sales-tactic off-put…

Agree. My current firm has a policy of not working with companies that don't post public prices, which sadly writes off CockroachDB for us. It's a shame because we have a major use case for it.
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