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CockroachDB beta-20161013

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Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#21

Post by aphyr »

mikecb wrote: post #8
exhilaration wrote: post #4

Like Spanner, Cockroach’s correctness depends on the strength of its clocks... Unlike Spanner, CockroachDB users are likely deploying on commodity hardware or the cloud, without GPS and atomic clocks for reference. I'm curious, do any of the cloud providers offer instances with high-precision clocks? Maybe this is something one of the smaller cloud providers might want to offer to differentiate themselves - instances…

The spanner announcement mentioned offering direct access to the TrueTime api sometime in the not too distant future. Edit: Quote from Brewer's post: "Next steps For a significantly deeper dive into the details, see the white paper also released today. It covers Spanner, consistency and availability in depth (including new data). It also looks at the role played by Google’s TrueTime system, which provides a globally…

Bingo. I've been hoping Google (or, heck, any colo provider) would offer this for a few years. Semi-synchronous clocks enable significant performance optimizations!

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#22

Post by tormeh »

sametmax wrote: post #16
BrentOzar wrote: post #2

"For instance, on a cluster of five m3.large nodes, an even mixture of processes performing single-row inserts and selects over a few hundred rows pushed ~40 inserts and ~20 reads per second (steady-state)." Wow, that's...not fast.

Even if they manage to multiply this by 100 on the final release, it's still way weaker than a regular sql db. I hope they have another selling point than performance.

It's named cockroachDB...

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#23

Post by radub »

will_pseudonym wrote: post #14

CockroachDB might be the worst product name I've come across. I get it; cockroaches are extremely hardy, but they're also much more strongly associated with uncleanliness and disease. EDIT: Also, cockroaches are BUGS! Bugs cause problems in computer systems.

http://morgana249.blogspot.com/2014/10/images-of-most-beauti...

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#24

Post by WhitneyLand »

Could the name actually slow the project's momentum?

I only recently read some cool things about CDB and wondered if I could have been subconsciously skipping articles about it for deep seeded reasons like http://bbc.com/future/story/20140918-the-reality-about-roach...

Of course anything good may eventually rise to success on its merits, but in case I'm not the only one with a subconscious aversion maybe the info below will help put some people one less click away. How about SurvivalDB? :)

CDB is a distributed SQL database built on a transactional and strongly-consistent key-value store. Scales horizontally; survives disk, machine, rack, and datacenter failures with low latency disruption and no intervention; strongly-consistent ACID transactions; SQL API for querying data. Inspired by Google’s Spanner and F1. Completely open source.

https://cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-questions.ht...

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#25

Post by finder83 »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #24

Could the name actually slow the project's momentum? I only recently read some cool things about CDB and wondered if I could have been subconsciously skipping articles about it for deep seeded reasons like http://bbc.com/future/story/20140918-the-reality-about-roach... Of course anything good may eventually rise to success on its merits, but in case I'm not the only one with a subconscious aversion maybe the info bel…

I agree completely. I love reading about databases, but apparently have been skipping reading about CockroachDB for that same reason subconsciously. I took a deep dive the other day and was amazed that I've seen the name dozens of times and have never bothered to ask what was special about it. It really is a fascinating database.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#26

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

artursapek wrote: post #15
will_pseudonym wrote: post #14

CockroachDB might be the worst product name I've come across. I get it; cockroaches are extremely hardy, but they're also much more strongly associated with uncleanliness and disease. EDIT: Also, cockroaches are BUGS! Bugs cause problems in computer systems.

I think it's the most memorable database name I've seen. So at least it has that going for it.

People will remember if the product is good so if you're confident in your technology you don't need any gimmicky tactics.

They're just hurting themselves for no good reason other than feeling good about their bad sense of humor most people don't sympathize with.

Imagine any IT department in a large company, when they're deciding which technology to use, this definitely matters. I mean, funny names like "mongodb" is alright, but the first image when people hear about "cockroachdb" is not a good picture. And first impression matters a lot. It's marketing 101.

--

Just think about real-life scenario of how you would recommend to a co-worker:

"Hey we should definitely use this new database. It's called couchdb!" vs "Hey we should definitely use this new database, it's called cockroachdb!"

Or,

"Hey we should check out this awesome way of representing API. It's called JSON-API!" vs "Hey we should check out this awesome way of representing API. It's called Swagger!"

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#27

Post by aphyr »

010a wrote: post #19
sroussey wrote: post #6

How does this compare to gundb.io?

Gundb is garbage.

To be a tad more concrete: GunDB can run in the browser as well as on servers; CockroachDB is a traditional, client/server database. GunDB is aiming for eventual consistency, but when I looked a year ago, it seemed like the algorithm they chose wasn't actually convergent--nodes could diverge because non-commutative updates could be applied in different orders on different nodes. CockroachDB, by contrast, is a serializable, single-key linearizable store. I don't think GunDB offers transparent sharding or SQL, both of which are important aspects of CockroachDB.

Both depend on wall clocks.

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#28

Post by artursapek »

atmosx wrote: post #18
artursapek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the most memorable database name I've seen. So at least it has that going for it.

I'm not a native English speaker and have troubles pronouncing "cockroach". In my view the naming is rather unfortunate.

Do you find it easier to pronounce "postgres"?

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#29

Post by geofft »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #24

Could the name actually slow the project's momentum? I only recently read some cool things about CDB and wondered if I could have been subconsciously skipping articles about it for deep seeded reasons like http://bbc.com/future/story/20140918-the-reality-about-roach... Of course anything good may eventually rise to success on its merits, but in case I'm not the only one with a subconscious aversion maybe the info bel…

Yeah, I've definitely heard people tell me "It seems cool, but not cool enough for me to get over the subconscious revulsion to the name" when asking about CDB.

I appreciate the name, but I think I'd have an easier time convincing people to use a product of a different name....

Re: CockroachDB beta-20161013

#30

Post by AsyncAwait »

finder83 wrote: post #25
WhitneyLand wrote: post #24

Could the name actually slow the project's momentum? I only recently read some cool things about CDB and wondered if I could have been subconsciously skipping articles about it for deep seeded reasons like http://bbc.com/future/story/20140918-the-reality-about-roach... Of course anything good may eventually rise to success on its merits, but in case I'm not the only one with a subconscious aversion maybe the info bel…

I agree completely. I love reading about databases, but apparently have been skipping reading about CockroachDB for that same reason subconsciously. I took a deep dive the other day and was amazed that I've seen the name dozens of times and have never bothered to ask what was special about it. It really is a fascinating database.

Well, given the claimed properties of the database, I can see why they named it this way, but it is not the world's most fortunate name, for sure.
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