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Comment by da39a3ee | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone able to comment on the extent to which Cloud Spanner and CockroachDB are in competition with each other? (CockroachDB is also wire-compatible with Postgres and originates as an implementation of something similar to Spanner)

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Just being "Postgres" is not simple. Both Spanner+CRDB provides some custom domain specific language that helps the data distribute itself around the cluster (or the world). Or for example, change the primary key of a table, so that the database can change the distribution of a table without having any down time.

I feel like the usual "lift and shift" claims that Cloud providers claims never goes as planned, and it is not something that you can just easily find by just reading documentation. For example, only after I started using CRDB, I found out that case-insensitive indexes is not yet implemented.

But I have been using CRDB+k8s for >1 year now, and it has been a great database. Basically 0 downtime, with minimal effort, including database upgrades.

There’s also YugabyteDB which is built on actual Postgres 11.2, reuses most of Postgres itself.

They achieve the same goal, but cockroachDB usually relies on the NTP and Spanner makes use of specialized clocks on Google datacenter to be able to sync the multiple instances.

Both have managed versions but crdb has “run it yourself “ option as well as completely free version (missing chngefeeds and incremental backups i believe but other than that is pretty feature complete)

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