Comment by sreekanth850

9 months ago

It's wild and hilarious, how often startups and companies go for distributed databases like CockroachDB/TiDB/Yugabyte before they actually need distribution, this trends sucks. 100 million rows is nothing that a well-tuned Postgres or MySQL instance (or even read-replicated setup) can't handle comfortably. Scale when you hit the wall.

100M isn't much even for not super well tuned postgres.

  • Yes, there are multiple steps to consider before jumping to a distributed database and only when you actually hit bottlenecks, like read replication, CQRS, etc. But I guess it's often just about chasing fancy stuff.

I don't buy this! Startups do need high availability. If you start having replicas you are already in distributed territory!

  • >Startups do need high availability.

    HA is important. But Postgres and MySQL both support HA and replication setups without needing to jump straight into a distributed SQL (In this context of using cockroach). We use MySQL Innodb cluster + MySQL router with auto failover on single primary mode.

    > If you start having replicas you are already in distributed territory.

    But it’s not the same as a distributed database with quorum writes, global consensus, and cross-region latencies. Those systems are built for horizontal write scaling, that come with added complexity and cost, which most apps don’t need.