Love @redwood's response though: "This is like a parent saying "We're really looking forward to our child learning to walk by her next birthday" and you responding: "I've got children in their 30s... what kind of parents focus on getting their kids to walk?""
That response to "ok we're going to make the database stable now" is quite reasonable for something which has had the publicity that CockroachDB has had. (Even the name suggests stability/availability above all else!)
The alternative is for CockroachDB devs to clearly state "this does not work yet, no one should be trying to use it" before all notable communications.
This is actually a necessary immune response to a "open source ecosystem" that is becoming overwhelming to navigate - people need to know what to not bother paying any attention to yet.
It's only overwhelming if you jump from technology to technology for real products. I have a list of up and coming technologies that I will play around with and build toy projects on over a year. If it lives up to it's claims, I might consider using it for real products.
Software is fast paced. You just can't ignore all unstable/beta technologies, you'll be far behind the game when they hit 1.0.
Hah - these days 1.0 is still alpha. Docker was still unstable at v1.6 (but I was able to deploy it at v1.8.2 if I carefully avoided many of its features). MySQL is actually pretty good at 5.5 / 5.6 but earlier versions were a bit of trouble ...
Wow, yeah...that thread has some pretty harsh comments.
Perhaps somewhat driven by Cockroach Labs home page, which mostly describes the product as they intend it to be, not as it currently is. The github page, blog posts, etc, are very transparent about the current beta status, but the home page is a bit marketing heavy.
Not trying to be overly critical, but rather, thinking it might be the reason for the harsh commentary. (commenters not seeing that the product isn't yet at a 1.0 release)
For me, I kept hearing "try CockroachDB" any time I brought up Google F1 or FoundationDB. Months of that went by then I see a post saying that high-availability & scaling database had no attention to stability plus couldn't scale to a dozen nodes. The criticism was warranted.
Their reaction to the problems and criticism was good though. They got on the problems. The product is in better confition. A dedicated team is there to keep it that way. Good ending.
Love @redwood's response though: "This is like a parent saying "We're really looking forward to our child learning to walk by her next birthday" and you responding: "I've got children in their 30s... what kind of parents focus on getting their kids to walk?""