Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB?

#21

Post by conistonwater » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 12:11 PM UTC

muzani wrote: post #20

atrilumen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the name is probably hurting adoption. The creature it refers to pretty universally considered repulsive. I'm no psychologist or anything, but I would expect that to have an undue influence on even the most rational person.

I don't know anything about it, but my first impression is that it's as robust as a cockroach, able to take a lot of damage.

The main metaphor I'm familiar with is that cockroaches always come back even as you try to kill more and more of them, rather like zombies, and never in a positive way.

Re: Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB?

#22

Post by cocktailpeanuts » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 1:02 PM UTC

muzani wrote: post #20

atrilumen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the name is probably hurting adoption. The creature it refers to pretty universally considered repulsive. I'm no psychologist or anything, but I would expect that to have an undue influence on even the most rational person.

I don't know anything about it, but my first impression is that it's as robust as a cockroach, able to take a lot of damage.

i'm pretty sure that's what they're going for, except that the rest of the world doesn't think so.

It will definitely not help any CIO or anyone in an organization who tries to lobby for their org to adopt cockroach db.

Re: Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB?

#23

Post by lokiju » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

diehunde wrote: post #19

irfansharif wrote: post #5

what "data warehousing"/"data management" tools are missing?

In case of OLAP queries is performance[1] which is not surprising since it's an OLTP database AFAIK. I don't know what he means by "data management" [1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/frequently-asked-q...

What I mean is - and I get that these are somewhat different technologies - snowflake offers a more seemingly comprehensive platform for data by aggregating it and focusing the product on that aggregation for future use.

Compared to Cockroach DB which seems like a niche SQL replacement?

Re: Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB?

#24

Post by lokiju » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

jaymce wrote: post #12

NOTE: I am on the product marketing team at CockroachLabs. Cockroach Labs has been building CockroachDB for over five years and has reached a level of maturity where many enterprise and community customers are gaining value from the database. We consider it a cloud-native database as it was architected with the same principles as a distributed platform like Kubernetes. It is built for scale, resilience, is shared-not…

Thanks for the info - very helpful. Are there any specific use cases that you can point to? I dont doubt that the tech is robust, just that the use cases arent too obvious right now.

Re: Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB?

#25

Post by lokiju » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #15

The locality features are huge. Being able to do database operations near where your users are is a big win for latency in global environments. Pairing that with edge compute like fly.io is a killer combination. That you can use most of your normal Postgres libraries with it make it an easy transition.

I see, thanks. The uses for locality seem a little niche though no? Are the benefits that much greater that it would be noticeable to users?

Re: Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB?

#26

Post by radub » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 4:21 PM UTC

lokiju wrote: post #24

jaymce wrote: post #12

NOTE: I am on the product marketing team at CockroachLabs. Cockroach Labs has been building CockroachDB for over five years and has reached a level of maturity where many enterprise and community customers are gaining value from the database. We consider it a cloud-native database as it was architected with the same principles as a distributed platform like Kubernetes. It is built for scale, resilience, is shared-not…

Thanks for the info - very helpful. Are there any specific use cases that you can point to? I dont doubt that the tech is robust, just that the use cases arent too obvious right now.

There are quite a few case studies / customer stories on the website: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/customers/

Re: Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB?

#27

Post by kasey_junk » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 11:47 PM UTC

lokiju wrote: post #25

kasey_junk wrote: post #15

The locality features are huge. Being able to do database operations near where your users are is a big win for latency in global environments. Pairing that with edge compute like fly.io is a killer combination. That you can use most of your normal Postgres libraries with it make it an easy transition.

I see, thanks. The uses for locality seem a little niche though no? Are the benefits that much greater that it would be noticeable to users?

You can see hundreds of ms of latency per request based purely on distance.

Tokyo - NYC is ~175 ms and that’s a good route. Compound that by all the requests you app does.

Re: Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB?

#28

Post by neilhan » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 6:51 AM UTC

Disclaimer: I am from PingCAP, the company built TiDB

CockroachDB is well suited for applications that require reliable, available, and correct data, and millisecond response times, regardless of scale, and belongs to the category of NewSQL, which promises to combine benefits from RDBMS (strong consistency) with benefits from NoSQL (scalability); it mainly achieves this through new architecture patterns and efficient SQL storage engines. TiDB and CockroachDB are a few of the leading NewSQL databases. Each database implementation has its own take on how to ensure strong consistency with a scalable architecture.

The following situations are some hints you may consider for a switch,

1. RDBMS is becoming the performance bottleneck of your backend service

2. The amount of data stored in the database is overwhelming

3. You want to do some complex queries on large amount of data that cannot fit in one machine without manual sharding

4. Your application needs a full ACID transaction for data distributed on multiple machines.

There are multiple choices for NewSQL too, engineers are always trying to compare TiDB and CockroachDB, here’s some considerations before you decide.

TiDB is compatible with the MySQL protocol while CockroachDB is compatible with PostgreSQL. You can directly connect to TiDB server using any MySQL client and benefit from the MySQL ecosystem. Plus TiDB is well adopted and trusted by 1000+ large scale Internet companies and banks.

Currently, CockroachDB is not suitable for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) while TiDB is a Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) database that supports both OLTP (Online Transactional Processing) and OLAP workloads. So with TiDB, a typical ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process that moves data to a different database for analysis is no longer required, enabling you to create new values for your users, easier and faster.

Hope the above can help you a bit.

Re: Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB?

#29

Post by lokiju » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

neilhan wrote: post #28

Disclaimer: I am from PingCAP, the company built TiDB CockroachDB is well suited for applications that require reliable, available, and correct data, and millisecond response times, regardless of scale, and belongs to the category of NewSQL, which promises to combine benefits from RDBMS (strong consistency) with benefits from NoSQL (scalability); it mainly achieves this through new architecture patterns and efficient…

Thanks, very helpful.

I have a feeling these technologies will be much more mainstream in 2-3 years

Re: Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB?

#30

Post by neilhan » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

lokiju wrote: post #29

neilhan wrote: post #28

Disclaimer: I am from PingCAP, the company built TiDB CockroachDB is well suited for applications that require reliable, available, and correct data, and millisecond response times, regardless of scale, and belongs to the category of NewSQL, which promises to combine benefits from RDBMS (strong consistency) with benefits from NoSQL (scalability); it mainly achieves this through new architecture patterns and efficient…

Thanks, very helpful. I have a feeling these technologies will be much more mainstream in 2-3 years

No problem at all:)

Indeed! With the current situation going on, the digitalisation accelerated, and the dataset is moving to a large scale, we see a huge demand of services like this.