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Open Source SQL Database CockroachDB Hits 1.0 (infoworld.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the New-SQL dept.

An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: CockroachDB, an open source, fault-tolerant SQL database with horizontal scaling and strong consistency across nodes -- and a name few people will likely forget -- is now officially available. Cockroach Labs, the company behind its development, touts CockroachDB as a "cloud native" database solution -- a system engineered to run as a distributed resource. Version 1.0 is available in both basic and for-pay editions, and both boast features that will appeal to enterprises.

The company is rolling the dice with its handling of the enterprise edition by also making those components open source and trusting that enterprises will pay for what they use in production.

80 comments

  1. And remember by nospam007 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Especially in these times.
    This one will still work when all the other SQL-Databases have died a nuclear death.

    1. Re:And remember by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Horizontal scaling - does that mean it uses shards?

    2. Re:And remember by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      still work when all the other SQL-Databases have died a nuclear death.

      And bundled with "Twinkie SQL"

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    3. Re: And remember by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But is it web scale? :-D

    4. Re:And remember by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, the server is alive... but it is buggy!

  2. Small subset of SQL by mi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    From their FAQ (emphasis mine):

    Can a MySQL or PostgreSQL application be migrated to CockroachDB?

    The current version of CockroachDB is intended for use with new applications. The initial subset of SQL we support is small relative to the extensive standard, and every popular database implements its own set of extensions and exhibits a unique set of idiosyncrasies. This makes porting an existing application non-trivial unless it is only a very lightweight consumer of SQL functionality.

    It may be a really cool software package, but, I gather, if you allowed for only a "small subset" of SQL to be supported, you could have MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Sybase as "fault tolerant" and with "strong consistency".

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    1. Re:Small subset of SQL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It may be a really cool software package, but, I gather, if you allowed for only a "small subset" of SQL to be supported, you could have MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Sybase as "fault tolerant" and with "strong consistency".

      CockroachDB is based on the Spanner paper. Within Google Spanner has had a huge impact (apparently? it's discussed in the paper.). The impact is in efficiency, fewer failure modes, and API simplicity over the tools they had before it (internal versions of Cloud Bigtable and Datastore). Both the paper and informal discussions with Googlers attribute most of this impact to the core ideas introduced with it, the ideas which inspired CockroachDB. Therefore, while CockroachDB guys could still fumble it, I've been taking CockroachDB seriously.

    2. Re:Small subset of SQL by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      The biggest innovation I see is that it does some kind of automatic sharding. Good comparison here.

      A lot of the source code is written in Go, which is interesting and probably not a bad choice. The code is clean and easy enough to understand. Its primary weakness is poor organization, which is also the primary weakness of their documentation. Both would benefit from the concept of "topic sentence, supporting sentences," so when I approach and ask, "what are the most important points here?" the answer is immediately obvious.

      Looking at alternative databases these days, you always need to evaluate them in terms of the CAP theorem. What do they give up? The website mentions several times that they are consistent. They are big on partitioning, so that isn't what they've given up, so they must have given up availability. They claim to have good survivability. It seems they can keep running even if one of the servers running a shard dies (they expect sharding based on geography), and they don't offer consistency for queries across shards.

      It's an interesting approach, but given the name, if the idea's any good someone else will take the idea and win with a better name. Ebola is an easier sell.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:Small subset of SQL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Poke around a bit:

      https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/sql-feature-support.html

  3. No, not shards by mi · · Score: 3, Informative

    Horizontal scaling - does that mean it uses shards?

    No, not according to the the FAQ, which says (emphasis mine):

    Does CockroachDB support distributed transactions?

    Yes. CockroachDB distributes transactions across your cluster, whether it’s a few servers in a single location or many servers across multiple datacenters. Unlike with sharded setups, you don’t need to know the precise location of data; you just talk to any node in your cluster and CockroachDB gets your transaction to the right place seamlessly. Distributed transactions proceed without downtime or additional latency while rebalancing is underway. You can even move tables – or entire databases – between data centers or cloud infrastructure providers while the cluster is under load.

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    1. Re:No, not shards by sodul · · Score: 2

      How well does it work in practice and at scale? The marketing claims are 'cute' but they stay marketing claims until independently verified. I have tried other 'distributed' SQL' DBs such as crate and you can paint me unimpressed with the performance and, pun intended, bugs.

    2. Re:No, not shards by Bite+The+Pillow · · Score: 1

      But is it web scale?

    3. Re:No, not shards by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      It's still sharded, the sharding happens more automatically though. The question is how hard it is for programmers to avoid bugs while dealing with it conceptually.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:No, not shards by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      But is it web scale?

      Only if it's run by Mongo-scale cockroaches.

  4. I would've guessed it's a pest control product by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Cockroaches check in... but they don't check out!

    Now with full support for ANSI SQL...

    1. Re:I would've guessed it's a pest control product by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Informative

      You mean ANTSY SQL

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:I would've guessed it's a pest control product by nospam007 · · Score: 1

      "Cockroaches check in... but they don't check out!"

      Be careful or you'll get sued by The Eagles.

    3. Re: I would've guessed it's a pest control product by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I heard hotel California has bed bugs. Dirty place.

    4. Re:I would've guessed it's a pest control product by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Would it use Terminix libraries? And more importantly, can it be hosted on a RAID?

  5. Sooo... Bugs are a feature now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    What's the target platform?

    1. Re:Sooo... Bugs are a feature now? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Any Android platform - Honeycomb, Jellybean, Nougat, Lollypop... Cockroach would just LOVE those

    2. Re:Sooo... Bugs are a feature now? by tigersha · · Score: 1

      Windows. It likes having other bugs around.

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
  6. Can't get past the name... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does CockroachDB work with RAID?

    1. Re:Can't get past the name... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it works with FCoE, but you don't know what that is either.

      It's funny. you making this bland mediocre joke reminded me of that post that talked about UCS IO hookups to tiered storage, where a LUN is spread across multiple and different RAID groups. And you thought it was about upgrading your windows version.

      So no I wonder if you were actually making a joke, or if you are not as dumb as a doorknob, but dumber than a doorknob. Tell us Heavy Creamer - do you realize CockroachDB is a database or do you think it is something to do with pest control?

    2. Re:Can't get past the name... by tigersha · · Score: 1

      /. should hold a collection and enroll you for this course:

      https://www.masterclass.com/cl...

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
    3. Re:Can't get past the name... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      /. should hold a collection and enroll you for this course:

      That would be a waste. Comedy requires intelligence and the ability to play the fool. The AC has neither.

  7. Oracle will kill this by hlavac · · Score: 1

    Cue Oracle buing then shutting down the company in 3... 2... That was probably the whole cockroachy business plan anyway

    1. Re:Oracle will kill this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Being bought by Oracle is one way to survive forever. Like being eaten by an immortal dragon and becoming part of its corpus, but less fun.

  8. They need a decent marketing dept... by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... because the men in suits who sign the cheques are really not going to go a bundle over something called Cockroach. No doubt it sounded amusing after a few beers on a friday night, but I'm struggling to think of any current IT products with a worse name.

    1. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by haruchai · · Score: 1

      ... because the men in suits who sign the cheques are really not going to go a bundle over something called Cockroach. No doubt it sounded amusing after a few beers on a friday night, but I'm struggling to think of any current IT products with a worse name.

      So, worse than Gimp & Git?

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    2. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Viol8 · · Score: 1

      Fair point, though neither of them are marketed products. I'm guessing wrt the latter, Torvalds learnt american english and so never found out that in british english "git" is a somewhat unpleasent insult.

    3. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a veritable hipster fest. The only thing missing is a penny-farthing.

    4. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Slightly better than Gimp and Git nut on the same level as Subversion and subversive.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    5. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Actually, as Torvalds is from Finland, he likely learned british english, like most of the world.
      I'm German, and did not know as well that 'git' means 'idiot'. Seems to be a rarely used word, in that context.
      But good to know.
      Actually, I don't even know what the long term is behind the acronym git. Well, I always assumed it is an acronym.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    6. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Git means unpleasant person in British English. It's not a term of endearment.

    7. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a veritable hipster fest. The only thing missing is a penny-farthing.

      "Cockroach Labs is the company behind CockroachDB, an open source, scalable SQL database headquartered in New York City." You are correct. Only hipsters would headquarter in New York City or anywhere in California. It looks more like a class project.

    8. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by epine · · Score: 1

      ... because the men in suits who sign the cheques are really not going to go a bundle over something called SCSI.

      And it did eventually get a name upgrade: SAS.

      Another fifteen years from now, after another transport remake, it will probably be called LAPP or HED or VD4U.

    9. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Tupper · · Score: 1

      I'm guessing wrt the latter, Torvalds learnt american english and so never found out that in british english "git" is a somewhat unpleasent insult.

      Torvalds knew the meaning of git at release time and quipped: "I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'git'."

    10. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ... because the men in suits who sign the cheques are really not going to go a bundle over something called Cockroach. No doubt it sounded amusing after a few beers on a friday night, but I'm struggling to think of any current IT products with a worse name.

      Look up "Adobe" in Spanish.

    11. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by haruchai · · Score: 1

      Fair point, though neither of them are marketed products. I'm guessing wrt the latter, Torvalds learnt american english and so never found out that in british english "git" is a somewhat unpleasent insult.

      I looked up the company's staffers and the founders are Spencer Kimball & Peter Mattis, the UCBerkeley roommates who gave us GIMP. Guess their sense of humor hasn't changed since their salad days.

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    12. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ... why not? you'ld think they'ld love have a tech product finally named after them....

    13. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      It doesn't mean idiot. It's a rather generic insult, which is why it's often clarified by adding an adjective - stupid git, lazy git, fat git ...

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    14. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Gavagai80 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If your marketing pitch is fault-tolerance, cockroach is a good way to convey that it's hard to kill.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
    15. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Another story is that the 'git' in question is Andrew Tridgell.

    16. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      ... because the men in suits who sign the cheques are really not going to go a bundle over something called Cockroach. No doubt it sounded amusing after a few beers on a friday night, but I'm struggling to think of any current IT products with a worse name.

      Look up "Adobe" in Spanish.

      According to RAE, it means bricks made out of clay (and sometimes straw). Soft mixed clay, sometimes with straw, molded in the form of a brick and dried in the air, which is used in the construction of various types of walls.

      I would add that adobe is typically sun-dried, not just air-dried, but the point is that they are not fired.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    17. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by present_arms · · Score: 1

      Brit here, a "git" is actually a bastard of a bastard.

      --
      http://chimpbox.us
    18. Re: They need a decent marketing dept... by MemeRot · · Score: 1

      Chocolatey nuget?

    19. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

      Yorkshireman here, fuck off and stop talking shite.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    20. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Reminds me when I suggested to my company around 1997 to build a refactoring and fast forward generator based IDE for C++ and Java. I wanted to call it Rapid Application Programming Environment. RAPE.

      One of the CEOs was from Australia and suggested I should consult a dictionary to see what "rape" means.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    21. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by tigersha · · Score: 1

      Blackadder uses it all the time

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
    22. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by tigersha · · Score: 2

      Bill Gates did the same when he named MicroSoft

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
    23. Re:They need a decent marketing dept... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm German, and did not know as well that 'git' means 'idiot'. Seems to be a rarely used word, in that context.

      It's very simple really: if prefixed by the word "fucking", then it has the original meaning of idiot. Otherwise it is referring to a revision control system invented by that fucking git from Finland.

  9. So they give you SELECT and call it "SQL" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Hey, now you can have that same thing in a "next gen" (or "3.0" or whatever term you like) software package, free from all that "legacy" code, well-tested over decades. I'm sure it makes sense if you grew up with MySQL and PHP and thought those were really good bits of software.

    Me, I think I'm going to take their name at face value and break out the professional grade pest poisons.

  10. Re:Making a Commitment to Satan by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

    What happens when I make a formal commitment to Satan?

    Wrong SATAN, Santa.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_for_Analyzing_Networks

  11. Dev Tools by js290 · · Score: 1

    Development tools are probably the most important factor in wide adoption.

    --
    "Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
  12. Re:Making a Commitment to Satan by nospam007 · · Score: 1

    "Satan comes to us on his own. Many times, we can feel him. He comes to guide us "

    Shut up, Steve Bannon!

  13. open source model is dicey by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The traditional open source model is "software is free. pay for support."

    For a big company, this can make sense. They can measure the benefit of support. They're into outsourcing things. But if the company becomes kinda-big, and it's a decent place to work, they can just support the software themselves. Canonical and RedHat are effectively in competition with "let's bring this stuff back in house." If their timelines are too long, or they say "no" too often, or the quality of their work is poor, it will not make sense.

    That would be economically elegant if "support" were the only work that had to get done, but obviously it isn't.

    For a small company, does it make sense? I feel like they'd pay their small fee, and in return get a bank of tier 1 techs that say "no" to everything or help you read the manual. All of the small companies I've worked for have not paid for support. I suspect this is because it's like a tax to them; they can't measure its effect.

    But the other poster is right. None of this matters. The only small database that can ever slowly grow useful is one that's fully open source because otherwise Oracle will destroy it. That's true so far: the only things left standing are suddenly-offered big databases that pull you into a walled ecosystem (SQL Server, DynamoDB, and Google's (Datastore, Cloud Bigtable, and Cloud Spanner)).

  14. Re:Making a Commitment to Satan by slashrio · · Score: 1

    Satan, that is our political leaders who wage war for geo-political reasons and out of financial self-interest, like shares in weapons factories.
    Satan, that is the leaders and owners of the military-industrial complex that lobby and pay the people in governments to start wars, so their weapons can be sold and used.
    Satan, that is the bankers who want to take away our cash and financial freedom, and want to destroy any non-western bank in order to establish their own and get all countries under their control. Oh, and charge negative interest of course once we are 'cash less'.

    There is absolutely no reason to look into the sky or soil, looking for a satan--or god for that matter--somewere outside of this world.
    Satan is here, where most of us don't see him because most people don't see hell from the satans.

    --
    "Trump!!", the new Godwin.
  15. Cockroach Labs makes CockroachDB. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 2

    Couldn't they have found a better name? Maybe PukeDB? FatalCancerDB? FootSmellDB? PottyTrainingDB?

    From the article: "CockroachDB may sound like a joke project..."

    1. Re:Cockroach Labs makes CockroachDB. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, there already is MongoDB, which is kind of hilarious if you're speaking a Germanic language. (Mongo being a shortform for "mongoloid", an oldish and very rude and derogatory name for someone having Down's syndrome).

    2. Re:Cockroach Labs makes CockroachDB. by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Uh, Mongoloid is an East Asian race - one that includes Mongols, Chinese, Koreans & Japanese.

    3. Re:Cockroach Labs makes CockroachDB. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      May the WP guide you.

      At least some knowledge before posting, padawan.

    4. Re:Cockroach Labs makes CockroachDB. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can't some marketing types join the coders on the open source bandwagon? It's hard enough convincing the Powers That Be that using open source can save money and not involve legal entanglements. Now I have to explain that this product is fine despite the negative connotation of the name.

    5. Re: Cockroach Labs makes CockroachDB. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh, I love me some FOSS stuff. I really do. I am a Linux user from way back. I still use it today. I even usually avoid closed-source, as much as is comfortable or reasonable for my personal situation.

      However...

      I'm pretty sure there's a game afoot, and I am not sure of the rules. It is almost as if FOSS developers, and I have released some code of my own, work extra hard to come up with nonsensical application names. I am pretty sure this is intentional, I am just unsure of the scoring process and finer rules.

    6. Re: Cockroach Labs makes CockroachDB. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I *think* many of them start out like some sort of self-deprecating joke, indicating that "hey, this is a stupid program I wrote, I don't really believe in it, but have a go at it and see what you think". And then suddenly it turns out to be pretty good and ends up being used a whole lot of people who weren't there from the beginning - and you're stuck with a silly name.

    7. Re: Cockroach Labs makes CockroachDB. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think we're running out of good names. At least by going for weird, you can sidestep the game of mixing and matching relevant, descriptive words only to find out there's some project using that name.

      There can be only one SQL Server, despite how many SQL servers there are.

  16. moderately difficult to setup timings by planckscale · · Score: 2

    I spun up 4 vm's on my LAN and tried to get it to work reliably but it seems a lot of how this database maintains cohesion and consistency depends on ensuring your servers have highly accurate times. It works and it's a great database for 'free' but it's not a non-trivial setup either. Anyone else have setup problems and maintaining the cluster due to time issues? https://jasoncoltrin.com/2017/...

    --
    Namaste
    1. Re: moderately difficult to setup timings by MemeRot · · Score: 1

      Interesting. Spanner works through custom hardware with atomic clocks. The whole point of cockroach was to not require something like atomic clocks

    2. Re: moderately difficult to setup timings by dknj · · Score: 1

      No but time in a vm is not very accurate. If you are using kvm/qemu this becomes even worse due to lack of fine grained scheduling compared to xen,VMware. In my experience, kvm can lose time due to runaway I/O on the hypervisor. Try this experiment again with the vms using tmpfs or otherwise minimizing disk writes.

      If I can contact you through your blog, I will follow up directly. Your project sounds interesting :)

      -dk

    3. Re:moderately difficult to setup timings by planckscale · · Score: 1

      What I found was that the clocks on my servers had to at least all have the same time settings so just getting linux to behave in terms of all machines using the same time settings was a challenge.

      --
      Namaste
    4. Re:moderately difficult to setup timings by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I downloaded and tried their demo from the website recently. After loading a non-trivial amount of data into it, it started choking while syncing everything up between the handful of "sites" I had set up. Fine, no biggie, it is just a demo. So I killed the processes that were spinning their wheels, and... it corrupted the database to the point where it would not restart... So, ya, 0-stars, uninstall. Nothing that claims to be "fault tolerant database" should be doing that straight out of the gate.

  17. Customer relations by tigersha · · Score: 1

    So, what are you going to run our website on?
    We decided on "CockroachDB" greatest thing since sliced...
    Sorry, uhm, sad to say we decided to go with your, well, competitor

    --
    The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
  18. I wonder by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What genius came up with the name? It's so bad it must have been from some loser who attended Trump University.

    1. Re:I wonder by tigersha · · Score: 1

      It is basically one big bug, likes having other bugs around and gets hunted by debuggers?

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
  19. licensing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "trusting that enterprises will pay for what they use in production."

    good luck with that...

  20. Mixed Messages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    When your database server goes south on you, there will be a swarm of cockroaches scuttling around to make the experience just that extra bit special.

    Yeah, CockroachDb. You'll know that when the sh*t goes down, there will still be cockroaches running in, on and under your servers.

  21. I don't trust it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I would rely on a more established solution like Microsoft or Oracle. Personally I’d rather not be on the bleeding edge of technology, especially if it blows up in my face. If that occurs , I’m sure it would cost more to potentially recover data, than it would have to just purchase something that was a little more battle seasoned.

    To paraphrase a quote from the Dewey Cox movie, "I do believe in you. I just know you're going to fail".