Ask HN: What has been your experience with CockroachDB?
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.
42 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 96.8 ms ] threadCheck 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".
Elaborate?
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.
(IANAL)
MongoDB used to be AGPL and I believe most people didn’t interpret the license as everything calling the database must be AGPL, and then everything calling the thing calling the database too, that recursively until the entire world must be licensed under AGPL.
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 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.
Especially when it’s so conspiratorial in nature and spreading information that is completely unverifiable.
A 12 year old product that still has poor documentation? Plus you say TPS = TCO. That’s a good one!
I have used an alternative.
Other reasons: it’s Postgres code under the hood, not a rewrite, so you can use existing extensions. I have even contributed the support for FDWs, which I use in production.
More here https://gruchalski.com/tags/yugabytedb/ and here https://github.com/radekg/yugabyte-db-multi-tenant-paas-demo.
What is prohibited, however, is you can't take CockroachDB and try and offer a hosted CockroachDB-as-a-Service to external organizations.
But if your organization has a DB-as-a-Service offering internally, you can totally add crdb to the mix (this is pretty common, as a matter of fact). If your org offers a service and its backed by crdb, you can totally do that, too.
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.
That doesn't sound like an app that's going to have to process a lot of data at all.
Is it the fact you can get clusters synched really well across regions? And is that really a problem for low transaction apps today?
[1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/export.html
[2] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-copy.html
Launched on a t3.micro (1GB RAM) - same.
Launched on a t3.small (2GB RAM) - finally it works and doesn't crash.
So, min 2GB RAM to serve about 10 (as in: ten, not thousands) records queried every other second.
Being a die hard fan of Postgresql for more than 15 years, I think time has come for me to select CockroachDB as new default.
I miss Table Partitioning (only available in enterprise edition ) and Full text search (yet to be built). Also minimum hardware I had to employ was quad core and 8 gigs of RAM.
But other than that everything is so smooth including installation, online documentation. It made me lazy.