Calling cockroachdb "not open source" is a stretch.
https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach
(The title is also wildly inaccurate to what's in the article, and should just have the articles title)
In How We Achieved 40K QPS and 20B Rows of Data in a Single Scale-Out Clustercockroachdb
cockroach
Go2014–2026
cockroachdb / cockroach
cockroach
CockroachDB — the cloud native, distributed SQL database designed for high availability, effortless scale, and control over data placement.
114Distinct people
170Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
32.6KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
CockroachDB — the cloud native, distributed SQL database designed for high availability, effortless scale, and control over data placement.
GitHub
Where it is used
- DoorDash — DoorDash runs CockroachDB as a fully abstracted internal database service for its engineering organization. DoorDash leverages it to meet availability goals at massive scale. Source
- City Storage Systems — City Storage Systems uses CockroachDB to run Tier 0 applications, migrating their order management system and user authentication platform to it. They replaced some PostgreSQL use cases with CockroachDB for these critical apps. Source
- 1 more documented example
What people are saying
Tried it before. Compatibility depends on how complicated your SQL is. There's a detailed list of supported syntax which is getting better every release but it's best for…
manigandham used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- kubernetes/kubernetes · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- moby/moby · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- pingcap/tidb · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 7:24:48 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year170 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-05-26 11:44:43 UTC to 2026-08-11 19:04:13 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 6 | 3 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 17 | 2 | 15 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 20 | 0 | 20 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 46 | 1 | 45 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 18 | 1 | 17 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 16 | 0 | 16 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 1 | 13 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
CockroachDB is a cloud-native distributed SQL database designed to build,
scale, and manage modern, data-intensive applications.
What is CockroachDB?
Docs
Starting with Cockroach Cloud
Starting with CockroachDB
Client Drivers
Deployment
Need Help?
Contributing
Design
Comparison with Other Databases
See Also
What is CockroachDB?
CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built on a transactional and
strongly-consistent key-value store. It scales horizontally;
survives disk, machine, rack, and even datacenter failures with
minimal latency disruption and no manual intervention; supports
strongly-consistent ACID transactions; and provides a familiar
SQL API for structuring, manipulating, and querying data.
For more details, see our product overview, FAQ or architecture document.
Docs
For guidance on installation, development, deployment, and administration, see our User Documentation.
Starting with CockroachCloud
We can run CockroachDB for you, so you don't have to run your own cluster.
See our online documentation: Quickstart with CockroachCloud
Starting with CockroachDB
Install CockroachDB: using a pre-built executable or build it from source.
Start a local cluster and connect to it via the built-in SQL client.
Learn more about CockroachDB SQL.
Use a PostgreSQL-compatible driver or ORM to build an app with CockroachDB.
Explore core features, such as data replication, automatic rebalancing, and fault tolerance and recovery.
Client Drivers
CockroachDB supports the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so you can use any available PostgreSQL client drivers to connect from various languages.
For recommended drivers that we've tested, see Install Client Drivers.
For tutorials using these drivers, as well as supported ORMs, see Example Apps.
Deployment
CockroachCloud - Steps to create a free CockroachCloud cluster on your preferred Cloud platform.
Manual - Steps to deploy a CockroachDB cluster manually on multiple machines.
Cloud - Guides for deploying CockroachDB on various cloud platforms.
Orchestration - Guides for running CockroachDB with popular open-source orchestration systems.
Need Help?
CockroachDB Community Slack - Join our slack to connect with our engineers and other users running CockroachDB.
CockroachDB Forum and Stack Overflow - Ask questions, find answers, and help other users.
Troubleshooting documentation - Learn how to troubleshoot common errors, cluster setup, and SQL query behavior.
For filing bugs, suggesting improvements, or requesting new features, help us out by opening an issue.
Building from source
See our wiki for more details.
Contributing
We welcome your contributions! If you're looking for issues to work on, try looking at the good first issue list. We do our best to tag issues suitable for new external contributors with that label, so it's a great way to find something you can help with!
See our wiki for more details.
Engineering discussions take place on our public mailing list, cockroach-db@googlegroups.com. Also please join our Community Slack (there's a dedicated #contributors channel!) to ask questions, discuss your ideas, and connect with other contributors.
Design
For an in-depth discussion of the CockroachDB architecture, see our
Architecture
Guide.
For the original design motivation, see our design
doc.
Licensing
All versions released on or after November 18, 2024 (specifically, major version series v24.3 and later, and patch fixes for v23.1.29+, v23.2.16+, v24.1.7+, and v24.2.5+) are published under the CockroachDB Software License (CSL). Source code in a given file is licensed under the CSL and the copyright belongs to The Cockroach Authors unless otherwise noted in the file or in a LICENSE or README file located in the same or a parent directory of the file.
Comparison with Other Databases
To see how key features of CockroachDB stack up against other databases,
check out CockroachDB in Comparison.
See Also
Tech Talks (by CockroachDB founders, engineers, and customers!)
CockroachDB User Documentation
The CockroachDB Blog
Key design documents
Serializable, Lockless, Distributed: Isolation in CockroachDB
Consensus, Made Thrive
Trust, But Verify: How CockroachDB Checks Replication
Living Without Atomic Clocks
The CockroachDB Architecture Document
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
18 sourcesThis misfeature can show up in surprising places. Any use of assembly (`.s`) files in a Go program will by default add the executable-stack flag, as we discovered in CockroachDB: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/37885
In Infectious Executable Stacks(Cockroach Labs developer here) In CockroachDB parlance, a "cluster" is just some number of cockroach binaries that have local storage and can connect to one another via TCP/IP. It's entirely feasible to run a multi-node cluster on a single laptop by just starting several instances of cockroach bound to different port numbers.
The Kubernetes concept of a "cluster" is a much broader term, encompassing the compute nodes and a lot of control-plane software to make all of the magic happen.
Fundamentally, running CockroachDB on a Kubernetes cluster abstracts away the process of getting the cockroach binary running and offers a lot of convenience to the human operator vis-a-vis reliability and service discovery.
We like to say that CockroachDB is "Kubernetes native" in that you can easily build a CRDB cluster using only the basic k8s building
Read the rest
blocks, without requiring a separate operator program to manage the deployment.
You can `kubectl apply` this config and get a fully-functioning cluster. https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/cloud/k...
Utilities like Helm et al. are certainly easier than managing a bunch of YAML configs, but they are entirely optional.
Some other CockroachDB+Kubernetes synergies to consider:
1) When using a StatefulSet and PersistentVolumes, a CockroachDB node will easily survive being rescheduled off of its underlying host (e.g. due to maintenance or hardware failure) with no human effort needed.
2) All cockroach instances are, from the perspective of a client, homogenous. That is, a client can send a SQL query to any member of a CockroachDB cluster and get a meaningful response. This maps exactly onto the k8s Service abstraction.
3) Federated k8s clusters and multi-region network fabrics do exist, although they're not exactly common yet. CockroachDB can maintain its clustering across "non-uniform network architectures" that exist within- and cross-region.
Not technically open-source (BSL-licensed), but yes, source available on https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/.
In CockroachDB 19.2Last month I tried to deploy cockroachdb in Kubernetes and I felt the documentation wanted to treat me like a 5-year-old.
I don't think the your product documentation has to explain what Kubernetes is or its terminologies[1].
The worst part is that it does not tell the cluster admins what need to be setup in the Kubernetes cluster at all, instead, it wraps a bunch of `kubectl` commands in a Python script and says "just download the script and run it"[2]. I know a simple `python setup.py` command is easier for novice to just try out. But it could really gives seasoned Kubernetes admins some headache...Our clusters enforce GitOps and nothing can bypass pull requests. Running some random `kubectl` commands is simply impossible. I ended up spending my day reading and translating the script into Kubernetes object definitions by hand and I didn
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For the record, the first approach was just used for simplicity in the blog post. The production system works differently (and doesn't have to waste memory per-datum) - we have typed containers, each of which have a primitive slice within.
https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/pkg/col...
In How We Built a Vectorized SQL EngineAgreed, we should be talking about the "timestamp cache" in more detail generally. While I'm here, looking at [1] helped me confirm how everything is kosher despite being in-memory. The timestamp cache pessimistically maintains a "low water mark", this always ratchets up monotonically and represents the earliest access timestamp of any key in the range. Writes happening at timestamps lower than this water mark are not let through, and bumping this watermark past the point of the observed write intent's timestamp is how slow inflight write intents are aborted by recovering read requests. On server restart, the timestamp cache is initialized with a low water mark of the current system time + maximum clock offset, so "future" write intents (or more accurately: write intents sent in the past but previously stuck in transit) are simply rejecte
Read the rest
Reading any software and taking inspiration from it is risky, because software patents inhibit the Progress of Science and useful Arts.
Here's cockroachdb's version of the BSL:
https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/license...
You may be right that this doesn't allow modification. I hope sentry words their Additional License Grant better.
> Consider yourself happy Torvalds didn't think this way. Or Guido.
Yes I'm generally happy when I get new stuff for free, but I don't expect that to always happen.
In Re-Licensing SentryCockroachDB Gains Support for Recursive Common Table Expressions
5 points · Open discussionTried it before. Compatibility depends on how complicated your SQL is. There's a detailed list of supported syntax which is getting better every release but it's best for simpler OLTP scenarios. [1] Horizontal scaling and reliability are great. Security setup and certificate management is horrible, and if you don't use certificates then you also can't set passwords for any user so its all or nothing for some reason. [2]
Performance for OLTP queries with high-selectivity using primary keys/indexes is pretty good. Will not be as fast as PostgreSQL because there's consensus required to get the latest data, although it now supports timestamped queries so you can get stale data from replicas for faster reads. Complex queries can slow down or stall the server. Deletes are handled by tombstones so heavy update/delete workloads will cause increas
Read the rest
ing amounts of slowness in queries until compaction happens so it needs tuning for your workload. [3]
Treats all the servers as one giant global cluster instead of multiple sub-clusters for each regional location so there will be very high latency for writes if you're running in multiple regions. I recommend sticking to a single region with multiple zones instead, or very close regions like US east + central.
Overall its a good solid database choice for core operational data that you want safe. Skip it if you need fast low-latency key/value (use redis or scylla) or large analytical queries (use numerous data warehouse options).
1. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/detailed-sql-suppo...
2. https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/32448
3. https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/32522
That is a valid point. Of course the question is, how big the contributions from the random people were. Judging by the list of contributors [0] a relatively small core contributed most, but I wasn't involved at any point so this is not a reliable assessment.
[0] https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/graphs/contributors
In Relicensing CockroachDB(Cockroach Labs founder)
The details are in the "additional usage grant" clause: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/8acfe8ffd0028c...
We decided to draw the line at whether the end user has direct control over table schemas. If users can specify the schema to be used, it's a database service and needs a license. If you're fitting everything into a generic schema (even if the user can specify things that look like new columns in the UI), it's an application and doesn't need a special license.
In Relicensing CockroachDBI wasn't able to find a link to the new license in the blog post but it is in their github repo for anyone interested https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/license...
In Relicensing CockroachDB> it’s not fully compatible quite yet https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues?q=is%3Aopen+....
So you're waiting for CockroachDB to implement features before you suppoort it?
In Scaling to 1M active GraphQL subscriptions on PostgresDefinitely. That’s why cockroach & yugabyte that speak Postgres but are black magic underneath are a great target. However, it’s not fully compatible quite yet https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues?q=is%3Aopen+...
Citus / timescale / pipelinedb are much easier and we already support timescale and pipelinedb well. Citus with native support for their distribution columns is going to happen soon too! These are packaged as Postgres extensions which is definitely first priority for us before moving to databases that speak Postgres and eventually to other databases as well. :)
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