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by inconclusive 3433 days ago
> 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?
1 comments
bdarnell 3433 days ago
(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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haimez 3433 days ago
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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elcritch 3433 days ago
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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haimez 3432 days ago
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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avn2109 3433 days ago
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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