Oxide and Friends Whither CockroachDB?
Aug 21, 2024
Dave Pacheco, an expert in engineering decisions, joins the conversation to share insights on CockroachDB. He discusses the shift from open-source to proprietary licensing and its community implications. The importance of rigorous evaluation in technology choices is emphasized, with anecdotes about challenges faced with databases like Postgres. Pacheco explores CockroachDB's strengths in cloud environments, revealing the critical role of monitoring latency and maintaining data integrity. Future considerations around the evolution of CockroachDB also make for an engaging discussion.
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Joyent's Manta Postgres Challenge
- At Joyent, they built Manta, an object store using sharded Postgres metadata tier with synchronous replication and consistent hashing.
- Managing high availability and horizontal scalability required extensive engineering effort to build on top of Postgres.
Postgres' Design Limitations
- Postgres design assumes database gets breathing room to catch up during downtime.
- This design works fine for typical workloads but fails under constant, high load with no downtime.
Postgres Autovacuum Outage
- Joyent experienced a rare 6-hour outage caused by Postgres autovacuum wraparound lock.
- This latent bug hit the database on the 200 millionth transaction, causing complete system hang.