How We’re Building a Business to Last

Re:How We’re Building a Business to Last by inconclusive on Thursday January 19, 2017 @09:36PM (#13441379)

> So what doesn’t a startup need to succeed, but an established company would consider an important requirement.

> The first is a fully-distributed, incremental capability for quickly and consistently backing up and restoring large databases using configurable storage sinks (e.g. S3 or GCS). The same functionality, but non-distributed, will be available for free to all users.

I appreciate that you're trying to write a good database and build a business, but what do you mean by "startup"?

If a database can't guarantee it can make backups, why would a startup attempt to use it in the first place?

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Re:How We’re Building a Business to Last by bdarnell on Thursday January 19, 2017 @10:32PM (#13441563)

(Cockroach Labs CTO here) This could have been worded more clearly in the post. There will be two versions of backup functionality: a basic implementation for free (Apache license) and a faster distributed and incremental implementation as a paid feature (CCL). It's like the difference between mysqldump and an InnoDB-aware backup tool.

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Re:How We’re Building a Business to Last by haimez on Thursday January 19, 2017 @10:54PM (#13441625)

Sounds like crippleware for a distributed database.

If you can't incrementally back it up, you can't really afford to run it in production in a cluster that has a large dataset. If you don't have a large dataset, you don't need cockroach db (first law of distributed objects, etc).

Maybe you'd be better off designing features for clients with specific requirements and very deep pockets.

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Re:How We’re Building a Business to Last by elcritch on Thursday January 19, 2017 @11:36PM (#13441754)

Not necessarily, even small datasets can benefit from a distributed database. Configuring a HA database setup for any of the open source DB's requires a lot of work. For a startup, a small cluster can provide HA, redundancy, and ease of scalability should the need arise.

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Re:How We’re Building a Business to Last by haimez on Saturday January 21, 2017 @12:21AM (#13448957)

No one cares about the difference between 99.9 and 99.999 reliability at the DB layer and then adopts a new open source DB to solve that problem. Especially when that exciting, new, experimental database cripples your ability to back it up. Hilarious.

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Re:How We’re Building a Business to Last by avn2109 on Thursday January 19, 2017 @11:35PM (#13441751)

Is there a reason you're calling your non-free product something with "Community" in the name? CDB is intriguing but this feels like intentional doublethink to me.

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