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

Cockroach Labs Gets $87M in New Funding

theinformation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 14 posts

Re: Cockroach Labs Gets $87M in New Funding

#3

Post by taywrobel »

alexmingoia wrote: post #2

At my last company, we had a great experience using postgresql flavored Aurora, especially because we could use recursive CTEs to do deep traversal of graphs. Since CockroachDB is SQL, what would be the benefit over using Aurora?

Being able to run it yourself is a big thing. You can also run one cluster across multiple cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), so there is no vendor lock in apart from obviously the database choice, and you aren’t tied to the availability of any one platform.

Re: Cockroach Labs Gets $87M in New Funding

#7

Post by overcast »

sontek wrote: post #5

We haven't tried cockroach yet because we are still on RethinkDB and are scarred by the experience of them going out of business. I hope someday I'll be comfortable enough to experiment and use something other than postgres.

Such a disappointment RethinkDB ended up being. Converted over my side projects quickly after that went South.

Re: Cockroach Labs Gets $87M in New Funding

#8

Post by latch »

We recently migrated a few small systems to CockroachDB (as a stepping stone). Overall, the experience was positive. The hassle free HA is a huge peace of mind.

I know people say this is easy to do in PG. I have recently setup 2ndQuadrant's pglogical for another system. That was also easy (though the documentation was pretty bad). The end result is quite different though and CockroachDB is just simpler to reason about and manage and, I think, more generally applicable.

But, on top of the well-documented postgresql incompatibilities, we have run into other issues.

First, and probably the reason you should stay away from CockroachDB's community edition, is the poor story around backups. You only get full backups. They are very slow to take and very slow to restore. There are even cases where it can fail to backup (https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/28948).

There are a lot of little bugs, which isn't a huge deal, but it's hard to find and you can spend a lot of time looking into it. Just yesterday we noticed that queries that use now() can't use indexes. Searching github's thousands of issues for "now() index performance" I get ~500 hits. Thankfully they are fast to respond to questions on slack / forums. But they _really_ need to clean up the hundreds (thousands?) of little bugs - some of them have been around for years. Most of them are near-non-issues, except for the time you waste looking into it.

Finally, performance seems worse than it could be. Running in single-node-mode with an _in memory_ database (for our integration tests) is still slower than postgresql. Restoring a 150mb dump file (just a bunch of inserts) takes over 2 minutes. But it's more than fine for the CRUD kind of thing we're doing.

Re: Cockroach Labs Gets $87M in New Funding

#9

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

Note that the marketing might make you think it's a drop in replacement for Postgres, and while it is very impressive, it lacks many common features and some are just different enough to be confusing.

The first difference I ran into was ALTER TABLE commands could not modify the datatype of a column. (It should be added soon.)

Your app probably won't "just work" -- yet.

But IMO this is the coolest open source database with a bright future.

Post reply on HN