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Comment by sciurus | Hacker News Reader

I understand that when building a business around the "open core" model it can be hard to draw the right line between no-cost and commercial features. Still, making backups a commercial feature surprises me. I can't imagine running a database without backing up the data. Is the intent to let people run CockroachDB in preproduction environments at no cost, but require anyone running it in production to purchase an enterprise license?

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This is mentioned at the end of the article, but perhaps deserves to be called out more loudly:

> While CockroachDB was built to survive failures and prevent data loss, we want to make sure every team, regardless of size, has the ability to survive any type of disaster. Backup and restore were built for large clusters that absolutely need to minimize downtime, but for smaller clusters, a simpler tool will work just fine. For this, we’ve built cockroach dump [0], which is available in CockroachDB Core.

As you say, it's a hard line to draw, but our expectation is that any customer who has enough data that `cockroach dump` is infeasible is the kind of customer who is already quite familiar with enterprise licenses.

[0]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/sql-dump.html

Can you give an estimate of how much data we're talking about here?

I haven't used CockroachDB, but it looks like they have a `SQL Dump` command [0] that can work as a backup. It looks like it is a simpler backup command than the command described in the blog post.

[0]:https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/sql-dump.html

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