Agreed. SQL support is a big benefit. This post does a good job of explaining why, and I'm glad they delayed the beta to implement it. Looking forward to joins.

I'm not sure how useful SQL is without joins though... I can see that this might be interesting to test against, but don't think SQL is much simpler than a lot of the query engines for non-sql databases... Until you get to joins, and similar operations.

Right now, I'm most interested in seeing RethinkDB see more traction... it seems to have most of the features I look for, and I, for one don't mind more programmatic queries, and the management interface is really second to none at this point... MS-SQL, I'd probably consider a close second.

For one, just indices in a strongly consistent distributed store, with ACID, is a big deal. Doing this yourself with another strongly consistent DB is a massive error prone PITA.

Plenty useful -- we have SQL-like query tools at work (which operate on SSTables and ColumnIO) that I use extensively nearly everyday and I almost never do a join. Just SELECT and WHERE gets the job done 98% of the time for me.

I can see many of the exploratory data analytic can be done without joins. Well, my experience could be too specific though.

> This is one of the most exciting DB's coming into the world, and I've had a lot of fun watching progress from the sidelines!

I'm going to have to disagree. The German HyPer DBMS has a lot more interesting ideas. Cockroach is just distributed MVCC from the 1980s on top of a key/value store.

MemSQL also has a new LLVM architecture written by the HipHop VM inventor that they poached from Facebook.

> Cockroach is just distributed MVCC from the 1980s

Yeah. Not so much. I can't think of anything that used the 2 phase transactions over independent consensus groups (aka spanner) pattern from the 80's. Likewise there was nothing like Yabandeh transactions in 1980 because no one actually understood serializable snapshot isolation then (but several projects mistakenly thought they had, which was Yabandeh et all's entire motivation).

HyPer is neat work, but that it is interesting does not mean CockroachDB is not also.

HyPer and MemSQL are in-memory databases. CockroachDB is not. This is a big difference.

And according to HyPer home page, HyPer doesn't look distributed, which is another big difference.

MemSQL used to be just in-memory. It added a second storage engine designed to hold data on disk using a column store.