I always thought MongoDB was a pretty horrendous, semi-racist name and they ended up dominating, for better or worse, the NoSQL market. Of course, I quickly found out that Mongo was meant to be related to term 'Humongous' and not 'Mongoloid'.

I think it's the most memorable database name I've seen. So at least it has that going for it.

I'm not a native English speaker and have troubles pronouncing "cockroach". In my view the naming is rather unfortunate.

Do you find it easier to pronounce "postgres"?

Yes but I'm not sure the comparison stands. PSQL was created in 1996 and it happens to be one of the 2-3 most common/famous databases ever made as far as I can tell.

If you're postgres, it doesn't really matter because you're already there.

Not him, but as a native spanish speaker "postgres" rolls of the tongue more easily than "cockroachdb" or just "cockroach".

People will remember if the product is good so if you're confident in your technology you don't need any gimmicky tactics.

They're just hurting themselves for no good reason other than feeling good about their bad sense of humor most people don't sympathize with.

Imagine any IT department in a large company, when they're deciding which technology to use, this definitely matters. I mean, funny names like "mongodb" is alright, but the first image when people hear about "cockroachdb" is not a good picture. And first impression matters a lot. It's marketing 101.

--

Just think about real-life scenario of how you would recommend to a co-worker:

"Hey we should definitely use this new database. It's called couchdb!" vs "Hey we should definitely use this new database, it's called cockroachdb!"

Or,

"Hey we should check out this awesome way of representing API. It's called JSON-API!" vs "Hey we should check out this awesome way of representing API. It's called Swagger!"

Agreed, they can change it if they ever get big enough. But before that more memorable brand is going to make it feel more trustworthy than the competition.

The founders of Cockroach Labs are also the creators of GIMP.

Created an issue here: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/13634