Reliable, Scalable, and Developer-Friendly Database
What do you like best about the product?
What I like best about CockroachDB is how it feels both powerful and simple at the same time. It’s built to scale automatically, so you don’t need to stress about servers going down or handling huge amounts of data—it just works and keeps your app running smoothly. The best part is that it uses SQL, which most developers are already familiar with, so you get the benefits of a modern, distributed database without a steep learning curve. It’s reliable, resilient, and developer-friendly, which makes it a strong choice for building apps that need to grow and stay online no matter what.
What do you dislike about the product?
What I dislike about CockroachDB is that while it’s powerful, it can sometimes feel a bit complex to configure and optimize, especially for beginners. The learning curve around understanding how data is distributed and how to get the best performance can take some time. Also, certain advanced features aren’t always as mature or as widely supported as in more traditional databases, which might cause a few limitations depending on the use case.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
CockroachDB is solving the problem of scaling databases without sacrificing reliability. Traditional databases often struggle when handling large amounts of data or when you need high availability across different regions, but CockroachDB handles this automatically by distributing data and workloads. For me, the benefit is peace of mind—knowing that if a server goes down, the database keeps running with no downtime. It also saves a lot of time and effort since I don’t have to manually manage replication or failover, which makes building and maintaining applications much easier and more efficient.
Cockroach DB review
What do you like best about the product?
Really good and simple to understand documentation.
Easy to work with, supports SQL.
Scales horizontally.
Low Latency
What do you dislike about the product?
Licensing fee was a bit pricy. Needed only when the scale you need is really much. Otherwise, directly using Postgres should be enough.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Solved distributed SQL problem. I can run database transaction operations without worrying about the scale of my database and worrying whether I need to shard my database later or not. Low latency comparable with other similar systems.
Positive Experience switching PostgreSQL to CockroachDB
What do you like best about the product?
We integrated CockroachDB into our existing analytics service stack, which relies on PostgreSQL connections, without encountering any issues. Everything worked immediately without needing any code modifications, workarounds, or special configurations.
What do you dislike about the product?
Based on our experience to date using it for our analytics platform, we haven't identified any dislikes
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We were able to launch our analytics service into production quickly and without initial cost using CockroachDB, which was a major advantage.
An amazing distributed sql db
What do you like best about the product?
The ease of use offered by the cloud options and the capabilities of the self hosted option.
What do you dislike about the product?
Maybe I lack experience with concurrent use of the DB, but sometimes the default config causes me trouble and I need to change it.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Currently we have a few products and cockroachdb is the default solution for db we use.
Get out of the way and let me work!
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.
Open source with extensive documentation and a University for training
What is our primary use case?
Cockroach nodes were installed in the following:
1. Single host, triple nodes (containers): for evaluation on a low-end PC.
2. Single host, triple nodes (process): to test applications against a ~500GB database in-house.
3. Serverless: hosted in Google Cloud Platform (the main database).
A number of Python scripts and some Java applications are happily reading and writing to the database.
The solution allows for scaling in cases where a PostgreSQL server (unless you use sophisticated partitioning across some machines) would not be enough to handle the load. This kind of database is particularly used for backtests.
How has it helped my organization?
I am a freelancer. A client of mine wanted a solution that would allow them to scale yet not abandon the familiar PostgreSQL front-end (and rewrite a part of their source code).
Scalability aside, CockroachDB is a fine way forward from PostgreSQL and is not changing the client source code part of the system. If you are lucky and you do not use newer features from recent versions of PostgreSQL or PostgreSQL extensions, it's fine.
There are nice-to-have features for big organizations like regional tables. At the moment, my client simply does not use these. However, the serverless offer from CockroachDB is reacting well as data grows.
What is most valuable?
The main aspects that are valuable include:
- It is compatible with the wire protocol of PostgreSQL. All applications did not need to be modified. DBeaver and SquirrelSQL worked with the normal PostgreSQL JDBC drivers. Libraries for other languages (C++, Go) also worked.
- The subset of SQL that my client is using is completely supported.
- The Cockroach documentation is extensive.
- Cockroach University is a very good starting point to learn.
- The availability of the open source offer, no strings attached, allows a full evaluation of the product.
What needs improvement?
I find the serverless offer a bit confusing. The price is a function of the maximum database size.
A single SELECT can use a number of request units, for example. If the throughput is high enough, you could run out of request units and be throttled if you do not pay attention to how your database is used.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution since 2020.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have never had a crash for the workload I experimented with. However, this is not useful information, since you may always hit a bug or a daunting workload according to your necessities.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is very good, considering that it is a relational database.
How are customer service and support?
I have no experience with technical support at the moment.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
CockroachDB is a big data substitute for PostgreSQL.
I have used a number of databases in my professional activity, and every tool has its drawbacks. For example, for certain kinds of jobs, when you do not need relations among tables, Apache Cassandra is a better choice for big data.
How was the initial setup?
You have just to follow the instructions. Of course, installing and configuring all by yourself requires a skilled administrator.
What about the implementation team?
I handled the setup in-house. The serverless solution is the one offered by Cockroach on Google Cloud Platform.
What was our ROI?
The ROI is good. At the moment the serverless solution is affordable according to the given workload.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
For their use case, my client wanted a "certified" version that they would forget to administrate, and so, for the main database, they chose the serverless offer.
For experimenting in-house they like to use the freely downloadable open source version, which is very easy to install. The price is irresistible, and if some crash happens there is a reliable backup in the cloud.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have evaluated TimescaleDB and Amazon RedShift. However, I chose CockroachDB as I had produced an experimental application some years ago using an older version and found it very easy to use.
What other advice do I have?
It is a complex database under the hood. It scales using big data techniques, synchronizing among nodes using Raft and continually compacting.
The integrated web console makes it apparently easy to use. But be prepared to study and spend some quality time with Cockroach University and the documentation. This will be useful when performing optimizations on throughput.
Also, if you can distribute the load on multiple nodes (possibly more than three), you will gain in scalability. There are some little formulas that bind the replication factor to the number of nodes to use.
Best postgre database
What do you like best about the product?
Basically cockroachdb is easy to use and it is open source distributed database. It accepts complex architectures which makes it globally accepted. It's best feature is geo partitioning into it's clusters. Support team is so awesome that they solve problems in matter of minutes.
What do you dislike about the product?
Though CockroachDB is an open source , there ain't any forum except stack overflow. It's setup is slightly complex from others. Other than that everything works fine.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use CockroachDB for Distributed storage of complex data for high reliability and high performance.
Powerfull DB as services
What do you like best about the product?
CockroachDB have best support and response very fast
What do you dislike about the product?
Still don't have respective support in indonesia
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Large data handle by CockroachDB and have powerfull DB and less latency
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If have large data cockrach will help with low latency
Ease of setup and use with powerful global delivery of data.
What do you like best about the product?
The initial setup, how straight forward it is to get started with the globally distributed data store. Beats everything I have tried so far from Oracle to Cassandra DB!
What do you dislike about the product?
Missing capabilities to create SQL functions. They a very handy to manage complex relationships or to manipulate large data sets - instead of having to pull them in the application layer.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Serving customer data, all local to them across the globe. Helped us achieve simplify the architecture, quick adoption of a truly globally distributed database right from PoC to MVP to now under development for production.
