Navigating Technology Choices: The Role of Intuition and Reputation

Lots of engineering decisions get made on vibes. Popularity, anecdotes—they can lead to expedient decisions rather than rigorous ones. At Oxide, our choice to go with CockroachDB was hardly hasty! Dave Pacheco joins Bryan and Adam to talk about why we choose CRDB… and how Cockroach Lab’s recent switch to a proprietary license impacts that.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Dave Pacheco.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• TechCrunch: Cockroach Labs shakes up its licensing to force bigger companies to pay
• Kelsey's Tweet
• Oxide RFD 53: Control plane data storage requirements
• Oxide RFD 110: CockroachDB for the control plane database
• Oxide RFD 508: Whither CockroachDB
• Joyent blog post on the outage due to postgres autovacuum
• Jepsen
• Dave's CRDB exploration repo
• Chrony
• OxF: A Debugging Odyssey -- debugging an issue that manifested in CRDB
• The Liberation of RethinkDB

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!