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Comment by inconclusive | Hacker News Reader

> So what doesn’t a startup need to succeed, but an established company would consider an important requirement.

> The first is a fully-distributed, incremental capability for quickly and consistently backing up and restoring large databases using configurable storage sinks (e.g. S3 or GCS). The same functionality, but non-distributed, will be available for free to all users.

I appreciate that you're trying to write a good database and build a business, but what do you mean by "startup"?

If a database can't guarantee it can make backups, why would a startup attempt to use it in the first place?

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(Cockroach Labs CTO here) This could have been worded more clearly in the post. There will be two versions of backup functionality: a basic implementation for free (Apache license) and a faster distributed and incremental implementation as a paid feature (CCL). It's like the difference between mysqldump and an InnoDB-aware backup tool.

Sounds like crippleware for a distributed database.

If you can't incrementally back it up, you can't really afford to run it in production in a cluster that has a large dataset. If you don't have a large dataset, you don't need cockroach db (first law of distributed objects, etc).

Maybe you'd be better off designing features for clients with specific requirements and very deep pockets.

Not necessarily, even small datasets can benefit from a distributed database. Configuring a HA database setup for any of the open source DB's requires a lot of work. For a startup, a small cluster can provide HA, redundancy, and ease of scalability should the need arise.

No one cares about the difference between 99.9 and 99.999 reliability at the DB layer and then adopts a new open source DB to solve that problem. Especially when that exciting, new, experimental database cripples your ability to back it up. Hilarious.

Is there a reason you're calling your non-free product something with "Community" in the name? CDB is intriguing but this feels like intentional doublethink to me.

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