I literally cannot find a single person describing their experience using CockroachDB, which is bizarre considering how long they have been around.
Would love to hear from someone who've used them in production.
Ask HN: What has been your experience with CockroachDB?
1–10 of 43 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with CockroachDB?
#2I know of two scaleups that have left it. As usual, this might just be poor implementation choices rather than product or support issues.
Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with CockroachDB?
#3(note the username!)
Check out Aerospike. It's the most robust and truly "zero effort scale" real time data platform I've ever seen. Properly configured and used, it whups everything in terms of TPS and performance/machine aka TCO. By a huge, huge, factor.
Downside is ... everything else. :/ Less polished developer experience, docs, &c. There are so many huge customers, but very few who are talking about it. Requires more of a time investment -- because you're learning a new platform, not using a drop in replacement for what you already know. But the reward is performance beyond anything else.
(the VLDB 2016 paper is a good high level overview of the architecture)
If you do check it out, be sure to use version 6.1 or later, in particular see what can be done combining secondary indexes with container data types.... A, uh, birdie told me that. :P
edit: Same birdie told me Aerospike has customers who replaced CockroachDB, when they found out it has trouble scaling past a point.
I really hope they can get their act together in terms of communication and marketing -- it's sadly "the most advanced solution you've never heard of".
Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with CockroachDB?
#4(note the username!) Check out Aerospike. It's the most robust and truly "zero effort scale" real time data platform I've ever seen. Properly configured and used, it whups everything in terms of TPS and performance/machine aka TCO. By a huge, huge, factor. Downside is ... everything else. :/ Less polished developer experience, docs, &c. There are so many huge customers, but very few who are talking about it. Requires…
> Same birdie told me Aerospike has customers who replaced CockroachDB, when they found out it has trouble scaling past a point.
Elaborate?
Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with CockroachDB?
#5Haven’t used them in production because their license doesn’t allow operating as a service.
I have used an alternative.
Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with CockroachDB?
#6Yeah I’d be glad to talk about it. Was part of a team that was asked to design a whistleblowing software platform for large corporate and government customers. The rest of the stack was RDS Postgres but this whistleblowing app had super different requirements. We would need to run in basically every region and also not exclusively in AWS.
After trying some different options it became clear that Cockroach was the best option by far. The strongly consistent nature of Cockroach made it a good choice for a SoR like whistleblowing unlike say Mongo. The ease of deployment and the stability of the Raft consensus protocol for managing ranges of data was better than expected.
For me having done a global rollout of it, I’d recommend it with very few caveats. You do need to train developers on what queries it can and cannot support, since it does have Postgres client support but obviously cannot handle the full range of queries. You also need to have lots of alerting around the Raft log, since that is your bread and butter in terms of “is this working or not”. However in aggressive testing, removing nodes with no warning under load, simulating pretty severe networking problems, etc, it has held up remarkably well.
Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with CockroachDB?
#7[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with CockroachDB?
#8(note the username!) Check out Aerospike. It's the most robust and truly "zero effort scale" real time data platform I've ever seen. Properly configured and used, it whups everything in terms of TPS and performance/machine aka TCO. By a huge, huge, factor. Downside is ... everything else. :/ Less polished developer experience, docs, &c. There are so many huge customers, but very few who are talking about it. Requires…
I don't really see how this competes with cockroach.
Cockroach is meant to be sql compatible, whilst Aerospike is nosql.
Is that why you commented under a different username, because you are affectively spreading misinformation?
Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with CockroachDB?
#9(note the username!) Check out Aerospike. It's the most robust and truly "zero effort scale" real time data platform I've ever seen. Properly configured and used, it whups everything in terms of TPS and performance/machine aka TCO. By a huge, huge, factor. Downside is ... everything else. :/ Less polished developer experience, docs, &c. There are so many huge customers, but very few who are talking about it. Requires…
> Same birdie told me Aerospike has customers who replaced CockroachDB, when they found out it has trouble scaling past a point. Elaborate?
Nah, I'd rather be vague. ;-) The issue, I'm guessing, was that CockroachDB couldn't maintain the required latency bounds and availability past a certain point for the customer. Those are always where Aerospike wins (latency, availability, while scaling). milliseconds vs microseconds.
The limiting factor isn't how many operations the platform can handle, it's how many operations/transactions you can generate before the server will even break a sweat.
I'm just a lowly engineer, and while I'll say some stuff on a throwaway account, this is really the marketing department's purview.... Casual googling confirms it's public information that Schwab runs ... nearly everything on it, and it's a much smaller number of servers than you'd think.
Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with CockroachDB?
#10(note the username!) Check out Aerospike. It's the most robust and truly "zero effort scale" real time data platform I've ever seen. Properly configured and used, it whups everything in terms of TPS and performance/machine aka TCO. By a huge, huge, factor. Downside is ... everything else. :/ Less polished developer experience, docs, &c. There are so many huge customers, but very few who are talking about it. Requires…
I don't really see how this competes with cockroach. Cockroach is meant to be sql compatible, whilst Aerospike is nosql. Is that why you commented under a different username, because you are affectively spreading misinformation?
> I don't really see how this competes with cockroach.
I never said it did.
> Is that why you commented under a different username, because you are affectively spreading misinformation?
No, asshole. Because it's a small world, and it's not exactly the smartest thing to do to.... never mind. Obviously you're gonna assume ill intent regardless of what I say.
> "whilst Aerospike is nosql"
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about, and have never used it. If you had, you wouldn't think of it as "nosql".
It's... more like a real time data processing platform, I honestly don't know of an existing category or comparable software.
At first glance it looks like a kvs database with a lot of bells and whistles. After you learn more, though, you realize it's not "just" a database -- you write your application with the Aerospike client library, using expressions, data modeling, CDTs, &c. Not using it as a black box for storing data.