[jclulow]

On the contrary, it sounds like a seasoned group of people who understand their needs and are wary of the very real challenges presented by most existing SQL systems with respect to deployment, testing, and especially fault tolerance. I'm interested in Cockroach myself, but I also acknowledge it's relatively new, and itself a large and complicated body of software, and choosing it represents a risk.

[jbverschoor]

Building your own locking mechanism to dump out a JSON file is exactly how you would do this.

> Through this process we would do major reorganizations of our SQL data model every week, which required an astonishing amount of typing. SQL is widely used, durable, effective, and requires an annoying amount of glue to bring into just about any programming language

and

> So we invested what probably amounts to two or three weeks of engineering time into designing in-memory indexes that are transactionally consistent

Sounds to me like someone has learned a lot on the job. Good for him, but it looks exactly like what I said before.