First time seeing someone call Spanner, CockroachDB, and YugabyteDB a "distributed key-value store with SQL" :)
The cons of the mentioned distributed shared-nothing SQL databases are questionable:
- "Key-value store" is in fact an LSM-tree-based document store that supports column-level versioning (Postgres supports row-level versioning only).
- "Many internal operations incur high latency." - I guess this conclusion is based on the referenced Gigaom benchmark that was paid for by Microsoft to compare apples to oranges.
- "No local joins in current implementations." (YugabyteDB certainly has colocated tables that store a whole table on a single node. CockroachDB and Spanner might do this as well.)
- "Not actually PostgreSQL..." - There is only one 100% compatible database with Postgres...It's Postgres itself. Citus, CockroachDB, Aurora, Alloy, YugabyteDB, and others can be classified as "not actually Postgres."
- "And less mature and optimized." - Well, both CockroachDB and YugabyteDB are on Gartner's Magic Quadrant of the top 20 cloud databases. Toys don't get there.
It feels like the author joined Crunchy to work on their own distributed version of Postgres. Good move for Crunchy, good luck!
I'm actually a fan of TiDB and Cockroach. I've met engineers from both, and they're super-sharp.
I am biased towards something like Vitess that builds on top of existing tech. The main advantage is that we can push-down the work to the lowest level, and leverage efficiencies that are already built in MySQL.
But the newer architectures offer better consistency models. Some customers may care more about that.
In the long run, I think these trade-offs should converge.
Overall, any NewSQL is a better alternative than using traditional key-value stores, because it gives you better functionality while not giving up on scalability.
The cons of the mentioned distributed shared-nothing SQL databases are questionable:
- "Key-value store" is in fact an LSM-tree-based document store that supports column-level versioning (Postgres supports row-level versioning only).
- "Many internal operations incur high latency." - I guess this conclusion is based on the referenced Gigaom benchmark that was paid for by Microsoft to compare apples to oranges.
- "No local joins in current implementations." (YugabyteDB certainly has colocated tables that store a whole table on a single node. CockroachDB and Spanner might do this as well.)
- "Not actually PostgreSQL..." - There is only one 100% compatible database with Postgres...It's Postgres itself. Citus, CockroachDB, Aurora, Alloy, YugabyteDB, and others can be classified as "not actually Postgres."
- "And less mature and optimized." - Well, both CockroachDB and YugabyteDB are on Gartner's Magic Quadrant of the top 20 cloud databases. Toys don't get there.
It feels like the author joined Crunchy to work on their own distributed version of Postgres. Good move for Crunchy, good luck!