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cockroachlabs.com
Company blog · cockroachlabs.com/blogdataprogramming
cockroachlabs.com is the company blog at cockroachlabs.com, writing about data and programming. Since 2015, 392 different Hacker News readers have linked it 755 times, most often “Living Without Atomic Clocks (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Cockroach Labs develops CockroachDB and Cockroach Continuum, an agentic database cloud-native, distributed SQL database designed for extreme resilience, seamless horizontal scaling, and global deployment.
Most-linked posts?
- Living Without Atomic Clocks (2016)22 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2016-05-04
- /22 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2016-08-01
- The Cost and Complexity of Cgo14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2016-12-28
- Relicensing CockroachDB11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2019-06-04
- Why CockroachDB and PostgreSQL Are Compatible8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-08-09
- SQL in CockroachDB: Mapping Table Data to Key-Value Storage (2015)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2017-07-09
- Why Go Was the Right Choice for CockroachDB (2015)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-11-10
- CockroachDB Beta Passes Jepsen Testing6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-02-23
- /docs/stable/licensing-faqs.html6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-11-13
- Pebble: A RocksDB Inspired Key-Value Store Written in Go6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-09-15
What Hacker News says?
> monolithic databases like CockroachDB (SQL) or FaunaDB (NoSQL) trade off extensibility The CockroachDB documentation says their SQL implementation is layered on top of their K/V interface: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/architecture/overv... This would make it similar to TiDB/TiKV and FoundationDB. Here's and old article from VoltDB insisting that layering SQL on pure K/V forfeits too much performance:…
Comment linking /docs/stable/architecture/overview.html
on “Apple open-sources FoundationDB”Submitted CockroachDB 1.0 as a story · 811 points
HN discussionSee CockroachDB’s Living Without Atomic Clocks [0]. TrueTime [1] is a proprietary Google technology. Considering TrueTime upper bound uncertainty (< 10ms) [2], it may depend on Google’s network quality and breadth. [0] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clo... [1] https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-con... [2] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Comment linking /blog/living-without-atomic-clocks/
on “Apple open-sources FoundationDB”Submitted Relicensing CockroachDB as a story · 487 points
HN discussionwell FoundationDB for one doesn't resort to clickbaity pseudo-benchmark marketing tactics https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/performance-part-two/
Comment linking /blog/performance-part-two/
on “Apple open-sources FoundationDB”Submitted Why are my Go executable files so large? as a story · 468 points
HN discussionI am not sure I am quite ready for that much adventure... https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cant-run-100-node-cockroa... Cassandra is at least the devil I know, although it seems to find a new way to fail me every six months or so.
Comment linking /blog/cant-run-100-node-cockroachdb-cluster/
on “RethinkDB is shutting down”Submitted CockroachDB license change as a story · 389 points
HN discussionCockroachDB changed their license to address this specific issue. See https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/licensing-faqs.htm...
Comment linking /docs/stable/licensing-faqs.html
on “AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service”Submitted CockroachDB 2.0 Performance Makes Significant Strides as a story · 384 points
HN discussionI've seen in Cockroach db documents last month : https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v20.2/cockroach-debug-bal... This technique even has a name : ballast file
Comment linking /docs/v20.2/cockroach-debug-ballast
on “All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk”Submitted Hello World as a story · 332 points
HN discussion... or you're Google and have a database in the hundreds or thousands of TB and literally have to write your own database (they went from almost inventing mapreduce, to going full circle back to full scale distributed RDBMS SQL with F1, which I wish they'd open source), You may be interested in CockroachDB, which was inspired by Google's F1 and Spanner implementations. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ Another contende…
Comment linking /
on “Why we lost Uber as a user”Submitted CockroachDB 2.0 released as a story · 299 points
HN discussionCockroach Labs | NYC, SF, REMOTE (USA) | Full-time Cockroach Labs is hiring a variety of positions including engineers, engineering managers, developer relations. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/careers/ Please apply using the above link. It's a great place to work, with interesting distributed systems and storage problems to solve, and we're accepting remote candidates at this time. Check out our blog: https://www.co…
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring right now?”Submitted 2022 Cloud Report as a story · 278 points
HN discussion(CockroachDB CTO here) We haven't implemented everything in the standard yet (Nor will we by 1.0 - there's a lot of stuff there!), but we are aiming to ultimately be compliant with the SQL standard. For example, when we introduced "time travel queries" ( https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/time-travel-queries-selec... ) we adopted the SQL-standard syntax "AS OF SYSTEM TIME" (as opposed to the non-standard out-of-band…
Comment linking /blog/time-travel-queries-select-witty_subtitle-the_future/
on “Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service”Submitted Pebble: A RocksDB Inspired Key-Value Store Written in Go as a story · 268 points
HN discussion(Cockroach Labs CTO here) Google launching Spanner is generally a positive thing for our industry and our product. It's more proof that what we're aiming for is possible and that there's demand for it. We expect that in five years, all tech companies will be deploying technology like ours. One of the big differences is that Spanner only uses SQL for read-only operations, with a custom API for writes. We use standard…
Comment linking /blog/living-without-atomic-clocks/
on “Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service”Submitted GCP Outpaces Azure, AWS in the 2021 Cloud Report as a story · 266 points
HN discussionhttps://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clo... > A simple statement of the contrast between Spanner and CockroachDB would be: Spanner always waits on writes for a short interval, whereas CockroachDB sometimes waits on reads for a longer interval. How long is that interval? Well it depends on how clocks on CockroachDB nodes are being synchronized. Using NTP, it’s likely to be up to 250ms. Not great,…
Comment linking /blog/living-without-atomic-clocks/
on “Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service”Submitted 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure as a story · 266 points
HN discussionYou may be interested in CockroachDB[1] and TIDB[2], which are open-source newSQL databases inspired by Spanner and F1. 1 - https://www.cockroachlabs.com 2 - https://github.com/pingcap/tidb
Comment linking /
on “Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service”Submitted How we built a serverless SQL database as a story · 265 points
HN discussionI wonder how this will affect adoption of CockroachDB [1], which was inspired by Spanner and supposedly an open source equivalent. I'd imagine that Spanner is a rather compelling choice, since they don't have to host it themselves. As far as I know, CockroachDB currently does not support providing CockroachDB as a service (but it is on their roadmap) [2]. [1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-quest…
Comment linking /docs/frequently-asked-questions.html
on “Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service”Submitted My Go executable files are still getting larger as a story · 264 points
HN discussionI didn't expect identical performance, but a 10~20% variance is just too big. For example, if https://www.cockroachlabs.com/guides/2021-cloud-report/ got a "slow" GCP virtual machine but a "fast" azure virtual machine, the final result could totally flip. The more problematic scenario, as mentioned in the article, is when you need to do some sort of performance tuning that can take weeks/months to complete. On the c…
Comment linking /guides/2021-cloud-report/
on “Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning”Submitted AWS, Azure, and GCP respond to cloud report as a story · 233 points
HN discussion>> We shall do better than SQL > The EdgeQL language looks cool, and I'm sure querying via a graph structure makes certain problems easier in some use cases. However as much as people have complained about SQL, it's just so ubiquitous there needs to be a very good reason to switch away from it. Not having to write joins isn't really a good enough reason, in my opinion. Oh, it goes much deeper than not writing joins.…
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted A Brief History of High Availability as a story · 221 points
HN discussion
