hello - recently i have began a serious investigation into using cockroachdb.
previously i had looked at rethinkdb but decided their referential integrity was not nearly strong enough, although much of rethinkdb certainly looked impressive.
sadly, rethinkdb appears to be shutting down
before we commit to cockroachdb, are there any possible assurances the same cannot happen here?
sorry to be asking this, but the cockroachdb news makes me a bit nervous.
There is no real way that any company is able to guarantee that, unfortunately. Companies come and companies go. It’s just the nature of the game. However, it should be noted that Cockroach (and Rethink for that matter) is entirely open source, so if something were to happen to the company CockroachLabs the database would potentially live on through community support, or become an Apache Foundation project or something of that sort.
In addition, here’s some food for thought- Rethink’s last round of funding was a $8M Series A back in 2014, whereas Cockroach’s most recent funding came as a $20.25M Series A last March.
I’m not claiming in any way that having more funding means the company will be more likely to survive, but it does show that there are a good number of people who have confidence in the product, and in the company to be able to deliver it.
Mark, thank you for the question.
We were saddened to see the RethinkDB shutdown announcement. Building successful open source businesses has been and will continue to be a challenge. Databases are particularly hard, because there are so many feature-rich, open source alternatives available at the low end of the market, and one gigantic, entrenched player in the enterprise space.
That said, as another poster has already mentioned (thank you for the reply @twrobel), Cockroach Labs is well capitalized (we’ve raised $26.5M from very strong investors) and we certainly have a great team. The technology that inspired CockroachDB, Spanner and F1, is what Google has spent nearly ten years building and is now migrating most of their internal use cases to. There’s a reason for that: what both Spanner and now CockroachDB provide is efficiency and freedom for developers.
Developers should not be spending time building application-level sharding for scale, or application-specific strategies for disaster recovery and automatic failover. While NoSQL databases ushered in solutions to scalability, they’ve also been a double-edged sword. Too much time has been spent working around the lack of transactional integrity or consistency. Obviously, what matters most is that developers are free to simply build their applications and trust that the database always does the right thing.
So, we’ve raised money, hired great engineers, and think we’re building the right product. We’re expecting to be around for a long time, but we’re also committed to open source, so CockroachDB is guaranteed to outlast Cockroach Labs (the company), if it comes to that. If that does happen, there will always be companies around to provide support. Percona and Cloudera come to mind.
Hopefully that helps answer your concerns.
I found this thread by accident but I feel I have to chime in here for a second…in case someone else comes across this. We still have RethinkDB in the stack of one of our future products (even though its original company is long shut down, and RethinkDB is now part of the linux foundation).
Rethink isn’t dead but I don’t think of cockroachdb as a real alternative to what rethinkdb is…its main point is the real-time push notifications rather than constantly querying the db for changes. wondering if you ended up going with cockroach, and how you managed the real-time aspects of rethinkdb in cockroach.