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Open Source Cloud Databases

Open Source SQL Database CockroachDB Hits 1.0 (infoworld.com) 80

Posted by EditorDavid 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.
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Open Source SQL Database CockroachDB Hits 1.0 More

Open Source SQL Database CockroachDB Hits 1.0

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  • And remember (Score:5, Funny)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday May 14, 2017 @11:42AM (#54414161)

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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

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

      And bundled with "Twinkie SQL"

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

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

  • Small subset of SQL (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mi ( 197448 ) <slashdot-2017q4@virtual-estates.net> on Sunday May 14, 2017 @11:47AM (#54414177) Homepage Journal

    From their FAQ [cockroachlabs.com] (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".

    • So they give you SELECT and call it "SQL" (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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. [google.com] 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 [wikipedia.org]. Therefore, while CockroachDB guys could still fumble it, I'v

    • The biggest innovation I see is that it does some kind of automatic sharding. Good comparison here [cockroachlabs.com].

      A lot of the source code is written in Go [github.com], 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 i

  • Sooo... Bugs are a feature now? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What's the target platform?

  • Can't get past the name... (Score:5, Funny)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Sunday May 14, 2017 @12:01PM (#54414245)
    Does CockroachDB work with RAID?
  • Cue Oracle buing then shutting down the company in 3... 2... That was probably the whole cockroachy business plan anyway

  • They need a decent marketing dept... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Sunday May 14, 2017 @12:06PM (#54414271) Homepage

    ... 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by haruchai ( 17472 )

      ... 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?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        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.

        • 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.

          • 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 ...

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

            • 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.

            • Blackadder uses it all the time

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tupper ( 1211 )

          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'."

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by haruchai ( 17472 )

          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.

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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by epine ( 68316 )

      ... 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 [wikipedia.org].

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

    • Re:They need a decent marketing dept... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Sunday May 14, 2017 @03:11PM (#54414973) Homepage

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

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

  • moderately difficult to setup timings (Score:3)

    by planckscale ( 579258 ) on Sunday May 14, 2017 @02:50PM (#54414877) Journal
    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/... [jasoncoltrin.com]

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

    • 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

    • 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.

  • 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

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