The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 38 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Kimball: Customers with zero software issues are actually more likely to churn
“You're actually more likely to churn a customer if they never have a problem with your software. Because they look at it and like, why aren't we just using the open source version of this? There's nothing that's wrong with this. We don't need support. What are…”
Kimball: Cloud services are cannibalizing the open-source business model
“Open source ate the software world, and now I think cloud services are very much cannibalizing the open source business model.”
Kimball: Mandate to open source is weaker than when Cockroach started
“The mandate to open source is not nearly as strong as it was when we started Cockroach.”
Kimball: Early exploratory sales hires usually must be replaced to scale
“As soon as that person starts to figure out what that motion looks like, you're probably going to need to replace them, because the person that can figure that out is not usually the person that can Mentor other salespeople and start to scale an organization a…”
Kimball: Buyers fear cloud vendor lock-in more than database vendor lock-in
“What they're worried about is the vendor lock-in from the hyperscale cloud vendors. They're very worried about that. So the right way to assuage their concerns isn't so much to convince them that they're not going to be locked into your system. It's to convinc…”
Kimball: Building a closed-source general OLTP database is a mistake
“I think that it would be a mistake for us or for anyone like us to build something that's closed source in terms of a general OLTP database system.”
Kimball: Data infrastructure leaders will keep a narrow product focus
“In general, the industry leaders in each product category will continue to have a more narrow focus.”
Relying on asynchronous database replication for performance is outdated thinking
“This idea that asynchronous replication is the correct way, maybe the only way to get performant database operation it should be sort of thinking from the past.”
Kimball: NoSQL databases lack sophistication for complex mobile app backends
“The problem is that, you know, in this day and age, mobile apps are getting increasingly complex, and when you have a complex mobile app, that translates to complex operations that are run in the cloud on the backend servers, and those the problem is that thes…”
Kimball: Solving strong consistency in application logic does not work
“It's actually an incredibly hard problem. It's incredibly hard to solve it above the database layer, which some people purport to do. You know, they're putting all these kind of checks in. Oh, well, you know, was I at this data center before? Am I at this data…”
Kimball: Be suspicious of strong-consistency databases not using Paxos or Raft
“So I'd be very suspicious if you see a database that claims to do this that doesn't use something like Paxos, Which is really the gold standard, and Raft, which just came out in in 2014 which is kind of a reimagined and simpler version of Paxos.”
Kimball: Retrofitting distributed transactions onto databases post hoc is very difficult
“You see a lot of the sort of distributed databases that currently exist attempting to sort of retrofit their database with distributed transactions. It's very difficult to do that post hoc.”
CockroachDB has open-source contributors from the US government and China
“We actually have you know open source contributors, like a whole team of 10 people from China, for example, And, ah, you know, some people from the US government because, ah, you know, they're so interested in it.”
Kimball: Most database problems at Square were solvable with Spanner
“If you looked at all the problems Square was having, and they had something like 70 externally facing use cases when we joined them, most of the problems that they were struggling with could have been solved with the use of something like Spanner.”
Spencer Kimball: Netflix operates hundreds of CockroachDB clusters
“They have hundreds of cockroach clusters already.”
Kimball: Winning Global 2000 customers requires multiple software deployment configurations
“If you want to win, at least in 2022, the global 2000 as customers, you really do have to have a product that, that runs in a variety of different configurations.”
CockroachDB combines NoSQL elastic scalability with SQL strong consistency
“So, you know, Cockroach bridges the gap. It's both of those things. It has both of those things, and it doesn't compromise.”
Data center failovers rarely happen in seconds due to manual intervention
“You also expect that the recovery time objective, when you actually have a major failure in a data center, like a replication site can be, you hope it's in the minutes. It's rarely in the seconds, because these things can be slow if they're automated, and some…”
Three-site consensus replication yields 43% higher non-storage resource utilization
“It does require three copies, so you're using three times, ah, three X storage as opposed to two X. But you actually get 43% higher utilization On your actual, ah, you know, resources other than storage.”
CockroachDB's regional cluster architecture closely mirrors Amazon Aurora
“This is a pretty interesting and common way to run Cockroach, and it's similar to what Amazon's doing with Aurora.”
CockroachDB collapses entire SQL transactions into single consensus latency round trips
“When you think of a SQL transaction from the begin to, you know, the various selects to the updates and inserts to the end transaction, we collapse that all into a single consensus latency.”
CockroachDB hits full TPC-C throughput globally despite 100-millisecond latency increases
“We've run TPC-C-T-K at this, and we get full throughput. The latencies are just higher, and they're higher by, like, a hundred milliseconds.”
Kimball: 95% of data in global software applications is inherently local
“When you're building a global service, most data, like 95% of it, actually happens to be very local.”
Proper geo-partitioning enables zero RPO and low global database latency
“It's quite possible to have zero RPO and low latencies, even in a global case if you do this kind of partitioning correctly.”
CockroachDB publishes all source code openly without a closed enterprise edition
“We don't have a, an enterprise edition that's closed source. All of our source code is, is available. It's all in the same GitHub repo.”
CockroachDB exclusively enforces serializable isolation without offering weaker alternatives
“We actually use serializable and it's not even an option. It's everything is serializable, which means your application developers never have to know When they have to do a for select update or something like that in order to lock safely if they're just using …”
Kimball: Google ran over 1,000 MySQL shards for a decade before Spanner
“Google didn't replace that system with Spanner, I think for almost 10 years. So by that time it had gotten to a thousand plus shards of MySQL.”
Early NoSQL database versions abandoned strong transactional consistency
“Strong consistency in transactions, and those are things that were dropped in the early versions of NoSQL.”
CockroachDB ran a 50,000-warehouse TPC-C test across 100+ nodes
“We recently ran a TPCC 50 K, which is 50,000 warehouses. It's a pretty big cluster and that was over a hundred plus nodes so, you know, it does scale.”
Active-passive is the most common database setup due to conceptual simplicity
“You typically see active-passive. That's the most common because it's probably the, this, the sort of simplest conceptually, and people can make it work.”
CockroachDB's default configuration achieves a 4.5-second recovery time objective
“Our expected time for the way cockroach comes out of the box configured is 4.5 seconds.”
Cockroach Labs ran 10,000-warehouse TPC-C benchmarks under active chaos testing
“We've actually run TPCC, 10 K, we probably could run 50 K, but it's actually expensive for us to run 50 K, but 10 K with chaos, and what chaos is, it's kind of like the Netflix model, where you actually bring nodes down.”
Google runs AdWords across five data centers to guarantee fault tolerance
“This isn't just sort of a, you know, a random example. This is how Google runs their AdWords system. With five data centers, and the reason is that you can actually have a planned maintenance on a data center, and actually have an unplanned, ah, outage on anot…”
Comcast uses CockroachDB's geo-partitioning feature within the United States
“Well, one interesting one is Comcast. And, ah, they're using it only in the United States, but they're actually using this geo-partitioning feature.”
Kimball: Google expanded its MySQL AdWords backend to 1,000 shards before replacement
“And I ran into this, like, really head first, like, into a brick wall when I got to Google in 2002, and they were using sharded MySQL in order to run their AdWords backend, and they went from, like, eight shards to 12 shards to 30 shards. By the time they repl…”
Kimball: Google ported 150 to 200 user-facing applications to Megastore by 2006
“By 2006, Google had moved away from it for building applications. By 2006, they published a paper called Megastore, and this system was something that a 150 to 200, I think applications that are externally facing Google were ported over to.”
Kimball in 2015: CockroachDB SQL support is aspirational and not started
“The top, the very top, SQL, is aspirational. We do intend to do it but we haven't started working on it yet.”
Under 3% of IT failures were resolved within an hour by 2013
“According to the Forrester research. It's gone from, I think in 2000, ah, seven, it was, ah, something like 13, or 30% of failures were resolved in less than one hour. In 2010, it was, ah, 10%, something like that, and in 2013 it was less than three percent.”