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

What to Expect in CockroachDB 1.0

cockroachlabs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–47 of 47 posts

Re: What to Expect in CockroachDB 1.0

#41

Post by elvinyung »

petermattis wrote: post #40
elvinyung wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed that the question on performance was ignored, but I think it's worth noting that FoundationDB died on exactly the same beach. [1] I'm not extremely familiar with the CockroachDB architecture (other than "it's kinda like the F1/Spanner/Bigtable stack"), but I suspect that there are some commonalities. For example, CockroachDB's Bigtable-style two-level range indexing means you could run into exactly this pro…

(Cockroach Labs co-founder here) CockroachDB also stores SQL metadata inside of the KV store, but that metadata is also gossiped around the cluster (i.e. it is replicated to every node) so that SQL execution almost never has to read it from the KV store. Handling changes to this SQL metadata is challenging and required a design [1] that is unable to take advantage of the easy correctness of simply doing reads from th…

I see -- so how is performance? I see that there are no published numbers for e.g. TPC-C or YCSB.

(For the record -- in case I seem to be especially pessimistic -- I'm actually extremely hopeful that CRDB will actually make scaling OLTP applications significantly easier for everyone. It's just that this probably shouldn't be FDB all over again.)

Re: What to Expect in CockroachDB 1.0

#42

Post by SilasX »

macspoofing wrote: post #38
manigandham wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it matter what the average person thinks? Are they making database/language decisions for your product? You can argue that potential managers might be influenced but it should be easy enough to put the merits of the product before the name itself.

This isn't really a rational discussion. We're complaining about a name.

If your definition of "rational" excludes things with an actual impact on your ability to achieve your goals, then you either need a different definition of "rational", or you need to stop dismissing concerns that aren't rational.

Re: What to Expect in CockroachDB 1.0

#43

Post by petermattis »

didip wrote: post #5

Any newer Jepsen test since this one: https://jepsen.io/analyses/cockroachdb-beta-20160829 Also, how's the performance nowadays?

(Cockroach Labs co-founder here)

This is a really hard question to answer because there are so many different scenarios to test. Even if you restrict the question to KV operations a simple answer isn't forthcoming. For example, if you want a distributed system with the fastest writes, then Cassandra is your best choice. Oh, but you better pay a lot of attention to all of the caveats regarding tombstones and node outages and overwriting data.

Overall, performance has improved a lot over the past year, but we still have a lot of work to do. Some of the high-contention scenarios that caused poor performance in the Jepsen tests have seen a huge improvement (10-100x), though admittedly we were starting from a poor position.

So far we've performed the most significant comparisons against Cassandra and MongoDB. In terms of performance Cassandra > MongoDB > CockroachDB, but note that most (all?) benchmarks test idealized situations. YCSB tests ideal write scenarios where data is never overwritten or deleted and data correctness is easily achieved because there are no node outages.

Unsurprisingly, PostgreSQL will outperform a single-node Cockroach cluster for simple operations. The internal target was to be within 2x of PostgreSQL performance for simple INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and SELECT statements. We were at that target earlier in the year, but a quick check reveals that we've slipped a bit.

Sorry I don't have anything more concrete to offer at this time. I realize I've been saying "we're working on it" for too long. Really, we are.

Re: What to Expect in CockroachDB 1.0

#44

Post by petermattis »

elvinyung wrote: post #41
petermattis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Cockroach Labs co-founder here) CockroachDB also stores SQL metadata inside of the KV store, but that metadata is also gossiped around the cluster (i.e. it is replicated to every node) so that SQL execution almost never has to read it from the KV store. Handling changes to this SQL metadata is challenging and required a design [1] that is unable to take advantage of the easy correctness of simply doing reads from th…

I see -- so how is performance? I see that there are no published numbers for e.g. TPC-C or YCSB. (For the record -- in case I seem to be especially pessimistic -- I'm actually extremely hopeful that CRDB will actually make scaling OLTP applications significantly easier for everyone. It's just that this probably shouldn't be FDB all over again.)

Performance is "ok". CockroachDB 1.0 won't be winning benchmarks, but that was never the goal. We have seen near linear scaling from 3-64 nodes on a uniformly random write workload. And the new distributed SQL execution engine has shown O(num-nodes-in-cluster) speedup on some queries. But none of this has been wrapped up into published numbers, so take it with a grain of salt.

Re: What to Expect in CockroachDB 1.0

#45

Post by dilap »

SilasX wrote: post #30
adrift wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with it?

Are you asking about rust? Not the parent but: Because the term has universally negative connotations: I don't like equipment that's rusted. I don't like when joints have rusted into position. I don't like getting rusty at skills. I don't like rusty pipes or rust getting into drinking water. I don't like turning on a faucet and seeing the color of rust come out. I know it's not 100% rational, but the feeling of revul…

Hmm, I've always sort of liked rust. It's pretty. To me it has connotations of aging and transformation, but not something necessarily bad.

Stuff like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Never-Sleeps-Young-Crazy-Horse/dp/B01....

https://www.pinterest.com/tmdesigns56/rust-is-beautiful/?lp=...

It's an interesting question of how much it's worth trading a memorable name for rubbing some people the wrong way.

Re: What to Expect in CockroachDB 1.0

#46

Post by tomcam »

kbd wrote: post #22
tomcam wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally I scorn suggestions like this. But I have had times in my life where I had to live with cockroaches and I really do have a visceral response to this worthy product's name. Seriously it's the only reason I haven't tried it myself. Dumb, I know, but there it is.

You're not alone. There are certain words that will evoke an emotional reaction in people, and projects would be wise to avoid them. Even if an author thinks a name like AIDS.app, murder.js, syphilis.io, represents the nature of the project well, I'd advise him to change it. Same thing happened with the "Nimrod" programming language. "But it means a great hunter!" No, people hated the name every time it came up and i…

Thanks for letting me know I'm not totally irrational. And your point reminds me of the product named Ayds[1] that was introduced right as the name of an increasingly well-known disease called GRIDS had been re-designated AIDS.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayds

Post reply on HN