It's an excellent name! It's telling a story, it's memorable, evocative. I think people complaining are all complaining on other people's behalf, i. e. they think others are going to be offended/put off/etc.

It's like that test where men were shown pictures of women and asked to (a) pick the one they thought was the most beautiful and (b) guess which one others would pick most often. Result: they pick the girl-next-door for (a) but think others will all go for the pornstar-look.

> I don't really get all the whining about the name...

Yeah, I'm not sure what's up with all the hand-wringing. Dunno if it's a generational thing, or just a peculiarity of this particular echo chamber. [0] None of folks at the jobs that I've worked cared about the name of a tool as long as it was good.

[0] I do take comfort in the fact that the hand-wringing is a tiny slice of all of the conversation attached to the submission.

I think it's more about the senior management and people like marketing, who aren't technical. That could go well: "Yeah so we're ditching MS SQL Server Pro and instead will go with Cockroach from now on"

Can you just call it something else internally? It's not like any of those people know what databases do and do not exist. Maybe CR, CRDB or like someone here suggested, RoachDB.

> if it survived a nuclear blast and had join[t]s

That would be Keith Richards and cockroaches (sorry had to). So two names are up for grabs for the competition.

It's an awful name but I guess they'll eventually rebrand.