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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I’m sorry but the name of the database needs to change. It’s like if I named my company “Disgusting Bug Company” then expected everyone to ignore the fact I named my company after a gross creature. Call it “RockSolidDB” and you get the same point across without invoking gross bugs.

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I used to agree, but the name actually seems to have an ironic marketing benefit: Everyone ascribes Cockroach's success to its technical merit. I've never heard Cockroach criticized as another dumb web dev trend caused by marketing and fads.

I propose that they further strengthen this effect by dropping the word "roach" from their name, and rebrand as just "Cock DB". /s

I don’t know anyone except the non-engineer non-programmer management types that gives a damn what anything is called. I respect the CockroachDB team for sticking to their guns on this.

Anyway, just call it CrDB, it’s an accepted alias. And everyone needs to stop complaining about the name each and every single time.

Actually I think the name is about the myth that a cockroach would survive a nuclear blast, as a metaphor for the resiliency of your cockroach database.

It is not a myth though that they have been around for 320 million years; that is resilience.

What makes it funny is they can survive everything but can’t manage to turn them upside down if they get flipped... kind or ironic....

But they're resilient as a group! Unless you could flip them all at once.

I believe their choice of name is actually very clever as it sticks into your mind.

If you need to list the names of the databases you know, especially if you are not an expert in the domain, and you have heard of it, it will probably be on your list just because it has a memorable name (regardless of its merits).

OTOH they monopolize the market of people who do like cockroaches

This comes up in every single thread about CockroachDB. It's beyond a dead horse at this point.

It's because cockroaches can be hard to get rid of sometimes if infested. So supposed to be named that since the goal is the database to be reliably and available with replicas that can survive failures.

I get your point, but I personally really like the name. It really sticks with me.

does the name... BUG you?

It's a nod at resiliency, clever IMO.

Obligatory link to BikeShedDB - https://github.com/tbg/bikesheddb

Problem solved!

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