Online primary key migrations is some interesting voodoo.
We ran it in production from the v2.x days before they moved to a new versioning schema and the support was really good. The paid support is worth the enterprise license.
It's also good to see the added work on supporting ORMs for shops that use it. We used SQLAlchemy heavily and had to do a lot of work to fix our app to work around the transaction retry errors which CRDB has been working on lessening in recent releases.
Looking at the product comparison chart[1], there's quite a lot of features that aren't in the open source "core" CockroachDB. That's fine of course, but the one that seems concerning is the backup/restore. Is there a reasonable and reliable way to do backups and restores with just the "core" open source product?
The only option is the dump command (full backup). But it's slow. And the restore is unreasonably slow. If you have a medium-sized database, you'll likely have to accept uncomfortably large (possibly even disastrous) data-loss window and a long downtime while you restore.
There's even cases where it can't work (1).
The free options from PG (namely things like barman and the built-in replication) is far superior to what the paid version of CockroachDB offers, let alone the community edition.
I wish they'd let you take a rocksdb checkpoint of a single node and restore that into another cluster. This should work if your replica == node count (a common setup). Getting access to the checkpoint isn't complicated, but recovering this with the leaseholders and cluster config baked into the database requires more insight into their abstractions than I have. Feels like something they need anyways, because, as-is, a permanent loss of 2 nodes is impossible to recover from (2)
Well, and eventually sets you up for some bad press. I assume a "I chose CRDB, and now I've lost all my data" story will hit at some point. And it won't be obvious for all the readers that they weren't a paying customer.
I may be misremembering but I'm pretty sure you can backup like any postgres database with e.g. pg_dump
I think the premium distributed backup/restore thing is for backing up separate regional clusters individually
edit: looks like the premium option is a nice "BACKUP" command that handles uploading or downloading from cloud storage (e.g. s3) automatically. but for free you get "cockroach dump" which is similar to pg_dump
The enterprise license gets you incremental backups.
cockroach dump is similar to pg_dump, but it's worth pointing out that pg offers a lot more than just pg_dump. Things like pg_basebackup (and accompanying tools) and various replication strategies and capabilities (e.g. recovery_min_apply_delay) make pg a vastly safer option from a DR point of view.
Maybe I've been living under a rock, but this is the first I've heard of the Business Source License (BSL). https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/licensing-faqs.htm... So after it converts to Apache 2.0 licensing, how does that affect redistribution of CockroachDB if I include it in my commercial applications?
First for me too. I like the idea of a time limited conversion to Apache. Companies w easily AWS’d apps need some leverage and having older versions being the only open source ones makes sense. I would prefer a non commercial source available license as well or open core but this doesn’t seem too unreasonable.
"allot.com" appears to be one of those "MITM Corporate/Parental Nanny Software" companies. You're either being MITMed by your company or your parents :)
As I alluded to in another comment, some of these systems require every single domain to be categorised, e.g. banking, news sites, game sites, political sites. (The purpose of that is so that the admins can filter out e.g. gambling and porn sites.)
So if cockroachlabs.com is not categorised, that could be one possible reason that it doesn’t load properly.
I don’t know if Allot does this, but I know for a fact that Fortinet has systems that works like that.
We ran it in production from the v2.x days before they moved to a new versioning schema and the support was really good. The paid support is worth the enterprise license.
It's also good to see the added work on supporting ORMs for shops that use it. We used SQLAlchemy heavily and had to do a lot of work to fix our app to work around the transaction retry errors which CRDB has been working on lessening in recent releases.