What do you like best about the product?

CockroachDB does what a database should do. Just sit there and hold my data reliably without me having to babysit. No worrying about partitioning. I don't care about servers going up or down or load balancers. I don't care if a new version is available. I just keep my schema up to date. Perform my CRUD operations and get on with building my business.

And did I mention the support? Recently I had an issue where backups to an S3 compatible bucket stopped working. Within 24 hours I was on a call with a product manager talking through the issue to understand exactly what happened and what my recommended path forward would be. Yes, by running a serverless database in the cloud as a non-enterprise I am giving up some level of control, which is what happened here when they upgraded to the latest AWS S3 SDK that had some incompatible headers, but the tradeoff is that I have zero operational headaches to deal with.

The last feature that works perfectly with my business model is the pay-as-you-go model where I can spin up as many clusters and databases as I like without getting nailed for every instance. I am in early days and I'm constantly spinning up new clusters for testing or very small customers. When I can create an isolated cluster for a customer and it only costs me a few dollars a month that's a huge win.

What do you dislike about the product?

The mot difficult thing about working with CockroachDB is learning how to think differently about the operational aspects. You have to accept that you are going to lose some level of control if you want to the Serverless cost effective model. Another challenge I've faced is that although there is a high level of Postgres protocol compatibility there are enough differences that you can't assume a zero effort lift and shift.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It provides a reliable database with no operational responsibilities for me.