Google Spanner Inspires CockroachDB To Outrun It by Timothy Prickett Morgan.
From the post:
There is an old joke that in the post-apocalyptic world that comes about because of plague or nuclear war, only two things will be left alive: cockroaches and Keith Richards, the guitarist for the Rolling Stones. As it hails from New York City, you can understand why Cockroach Labs, the upstart software company that is cloning Google’s Spanner distributed relational database, chose that particular bug to epitomize a system that will stay alive no matter what. But, they could have just as easily called it RichardsDB.
When discussing Google’s cloud implementation of Spanner, which launched in beta earlier this week, we promised that we would have a sit down with the people behind the CockroachDB effort, who not coincidentally all hail from the search engine giant and who all worked on key parts of the software infrastructure that sets Google apart. We think that CockroachDB has the potential to shake up the database market, and not just because the people behind it understand deeply what Google did but more importantly because they have come to understand the very different approach that is necessary to commercialize the ideas that are embodied in Spanner and that are being coded into a free and open source CockroachDB.
Cockroach Labs has the potential to be Yahoo’s Hadoop and HDFS to Google’s MapReduce and Google File System, but in a database market that is ripe for change and among enterprise customers who want simplicity from complex systems and they want them to scale instantly, easily, and geographically.
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“The backbreaking work is making CockroachDB deployable,” Kimball explains. “In fact, CockroachDB is more deployable than any other distributed database out there. It is an incredibly simple model in that every single node – we call them roach nodes – is symmetric and self-contained with a single binary. There are no external dependencies, so you don’t need Zookeeper running, you don’t need etcd or a distributed or shared file system underneath like Oracle needs with its Real Application Clusters. It is simple as taking one statically linked binary with no dependencies and putting that out on some VM somewhere and pointing it at any other node in a CockroachDB cluster and it joins up and they self organize. So making that work with a single binary was a huge challenge and a big departure from the way Google chose to build Spanner.”
Another big difference is support for SQL, and Kimball had plenty to say about this.
“This is a really interesting point,” he says excitedly. “We have had to build CockroachDB to be deployable as open source in a way that doesn’t need TrueTime and that meets all of the needs of these companies. With open source and there being such a low barrier to try it out and kick the tires, you really need to have a very comprehensive, compatible interface with the outside world. You can’t really cut corners. So we decided to make CockroachDB look like Postgres because it is a better thought out database than MySQL. The nice thing about making it look like Postgres is that all of the applications and languages have drivers for it.”
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There are other capabilities built into CockroachDB but being deployable (compared to other distributed databases) and looking like Postgres are keys to a large marketplace share.
The gap between software available to governments/industry and individuals/small groups continues to shrink.
Only you can answer the question of your skill versus theirs.