At first when I saw yet more name comments on this thread I felt disappointment that people can't leave the subject alone.

But then I realized that as someone who doesn't care about the name, even positively enjoys it, I have a competitive advantage over those people.

Now I feel good again.

Choosing technologies based on first-hand review and first principles rather than things like Gartner magic quadrants, big company brand recognition, feature lists, and "serious" sounding names is a competitive advantage that startups often have over big businesses. The latter are forced by their procurement departments and other forces to use old, inferior, and more costly technology.

On the flip side though if I were in charge of CockroachDB I would look at doing something about the name. Maybe rename it something like "Resilient" as part of the "exit from beta" milestone. It's going to be a serious liability for them selling to the kinds of customers I described above, and unfortunately that's where most of the money is in these devops/infrastructure markets. The key to success is to make a superior product and then figure out how to sell it to pointy haired bosses. The latter often means making it look more boring than it actually is.

Fun factoid: scientists sometimes do this with grant proposals. I've had two scientists independently tell me that they often take cool, fascinating research proposals and "make them boring" to sell them to bureaucrats. "You have to hide all the interesting stuff and make it sound like you are doing boring incremental research. If you talk about anything 'revolutionary' you will never get funded."

I see it as technical people on HN who appreciate the metaphor, versus marketing/business people who can only think of "image".

It's to expected with the massive infestation of HN by suits and khakis in the last few years.

I think the problem is worse: marketing / business people have convinced the worker that this surface level analysis is all we can expect of anyone. As said by other commenters: if the name of the DB solution influences your choice then you're probably gonna get what you deserve.

(Within reason. Someone on here actually said this argument is reasonable to have "because what would you do if they named it 'n-word'DB." Seriously.)

It appears to me that "marketing/business" people are simply stereotyped in this thread, because surely the complaints come mostly from "tech people".

It's the classic case of everyone saying "I think it's great buy <somebody> will complain". Which ends in mindless mediocracy.

Go CockroachDB!

I agree with all your points. That being said MongoDB, Aerospike and Hadoop have all gotten good traction even with their slightly silly names.

To me, cockroaches are such an unbelievably negative association that I don't think I could get over the name and work with this product, because I wouldn't want to be saying cockroach all the time.

Same thing if your database was called BedBug.

> I don't think I could get over the name and work with this product

That puts everyone competing with you at a HUGE competitive advantage. Making technical decisions based on the name of a product is the worst type of decision making.

To me, cockroaches aren't disgusting. And yes, I have used an outhouse in a 3rd world country where cockroaches were swarming up and out... But they just don't disgust me.

It's a bad name because this topic will come up every time it's discussed, forever. It's a distraction from other relevant issues like new features or how it performs.

Strangely, it seems to be helping them. Usually whenever there's an excellent product/article featured on HN, there's not much to say, so there are very few comments. CockroachDB seems like an excellent product, yet the firestorm about their name is fueling discussion, which amusingly might be leading to more upvotes from people who dislike that they're being discriminated against based on their name. It's counterintuitive internet behavior at its finest, similar to everyone complaining that Soylent was a terrible name.

I hope it is excellent and advances the state of the art, but it won't reach it's full potential until it has a name people can use when talking to users, customers, and board members.

"Well first we collect all of the data in the Epidemic schema, run it through the Apocalypse pipeline to transform it into something that our Extinction servers can handle, and finally store it in CockroachDB."

As the creator of a moderately popular open source project, I can attest that the name of the project is very important.

A common problem for open source projects is that the name is not recognizable enough (e.g. too technical) or too generic (e.g. a simple English word which makes is heard to search on Google).

In this case the name evokes negative emotions of fear and disgust which are not what you want to associate with a database.

I wondered for a time if the action movie XXX[0] chose that name because it would be very hard to search online.

[0] http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0295701/

Back in 2000, I used to enjoy an online streaming radio station called echo.com, and as a sort of reward for listening, you could earn Amazon gift certificates.

I tried googling for "Amazon echo gift certificates" but I couldn't quite find what I was looking for.

I miss AltaVista.

There is a tools menu on Google search where you can set a date range. Not perfect, but it helps.

But you'd want your airline named "Virgin" and your morning-after pill named "Plan B"?

The name is, indeed, evocative. Good names don't have to universally convey "positive" emotions.