[bdarnell]

(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.

[haimez]

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.

[elcritch]

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.

[haimez]

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.

[avn2109]

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.