Still very much "open-source": https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach
But relicensed to the "CockroachDB Software License" as a form of BSL to prevent reselling.
In 7 Databases in 7 Weeks for 2025cockroachdb
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, 10:01:16 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
10 sourcesCockroachDB Core uses 3 licenses: CCL, BSL, Apache
CCL, BSL = "source available"
Apache = open source
Parts of CockroachDB under CCL that do NOT transition to Apache OSS: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/tree/master/pkg/ccl
> the sub-tree under pkg/ccl is under a different license (CCL) that does not transition to APL2 after a set duration.
https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/discussions/127140#...
In CockroachDB license changeCockroachDB Core uses 3 licenses: CCL, BSL, Apache
CCL, BSL = "source available"
Apache = open source
Parts of CockroachDB under CCL that do NOT transition to Apache OSS: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/tree/master/pkg/ccl
> the sub-tree under pkg/ccl is under a different license (CCL) that does not transition to APL2 after a set duration.
https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/discussions/127140#...
In CockroachDB license changeI searched github and thought this[0] was it.
> Source code in this repository is variously licensed under the Business Source
License 1.1 (BSL), the CockroachDB Community License (CCL), the MIT license,
BSD-style licenses, and other licenses specified in the source code. Source
code in a given file is licensed under the BSL and the copyright belongs to The
Cockroach Authors unless otherwise noted at the beginning of the file.
Is the caveat in this part (that I didn't catch before)? "Source
code in a given file is licensed under the BSL and ..." That is sucky.
[0] https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach?tab=License-1-ov-fi...
In CockroachDB license change> CockroachDB - the open source, cloud-native distributed SQL database.
https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach
In CockroachDB license changeRound rectangles can look not round enough on low-DPI displays, and the colors can also be wrong due to incorrect averaging in non-linear color space. Example: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/33453#issuecom...
It is similar to how subtle gradients look striped and dirty on many websites if displayed with only 24-bit color: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/91316
In Round Rects Are EverywhereRestate is built as a sharded replicated state machine similar to how TiKV (https://tikv.org/), Kudu (https://kudu.apache.org/kudu.pdf) or CockroachDB (https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach) are designed. Instead of relying on a specific consensus implementation, we have decided to encapsulate this part into a virtual log (inspired by Delos https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi20-balakrishnan.pdf) since it makes it possible to tune the system more easily for different deployment scenarios (on-prem, cloud, cost-effective blob storage). Moreover, it allows for some other cool things like seamlessly moving from one log implementation to another. Apart from that the whole system design has been influenced by ideas from stream processing systems such as Apache Flink (https://flink.apache.org/), log storage systems such as LogDevice (http
Read the rest
s://logdevice.io/) and others.
We plan to publish a more detailed follow-up blog post where we explain why we developed a new stateful system, how we implemented it, and what the benefits are. Stay tuned!
cockroachdb might be close: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach
In A MySQL compatible database engine written in pure GoAuthor here. We've spent the past year adding read committed isolation to CockroachDB.
There were many interesting design decisions, such as:
- whether to use multiple snapshots or a single snapshot per statement
- how to handle read uncertainty intervals
- how to incorporate SELECT FOR UPDATE locking into Raft
- how to handle SELECT FOR UPDATE subqueries
- how to prevent lost update anomalies between two UPDATEs
Some of the gory details are in the public RFC: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/RF...
This blog post just discusses the last point, but please AMA.
In Why CockroachDB doesn't use EvalPlanQual