CockroachDB has SQL close enough to
# spicedbm
mcordingley
10/19/2023, 2:39 PMCockroachDB has SQL close enough to Postgres that I think SpiceDB wouldn't need a special driver for it. I'm guessing distinguishing it makes SpiceDB able to do extra. My question is what is that?
e
ecordell
10/19/2023, 2:40 PMThe biggest difference is that we use CockroachDB's native support for time-travel queries to run queries at a specific snapshot of the datastore.
In postgres, we have to do a lot of extra bookkeeping (to know which relationships should be visible at what snapshots) to get the same thing
ecordell
10/19/2023, 2:42 PMbut cockroach also requires a little extra work to be save, because it is not linearizable
since cockroach is a cluster and not just one machine, we also do special handling to ensure the load is distributed evenly over the whole cluster
ecordell
10/19/2023, 2:44 PMwrote some about these topics here:
https://authzed.com/blog/prevent-newenemy-cockroachdb
https://authzed.com/blog/maximizing-cockroachdb-performance
m
mcordingley
10/19/2023, 3:23 PMAppreciate the copious documentation. 👍
j
jzelinskie
10/19/2023, 11:15 PMWe actually used to run the Postgres datastore driver against CRDB just to see if it was compatible, but we stopped. There's no good reason to do that when the native CRDB datastore exists
m
mcordingley
10/25/2023, 3:28 PMTrue enough. How well does SpiceDB work with active/active flavors of Postgres? My DB team has a strong preference for running that instead of CRDB. They're not hostile to CRDB, but it is proving to be a difficult sell if we self-host.
j
jzelinskie
11/01/2023, 3:24 PMI don't think we've experimented with any of the active/active Postgres solutions. SpiceDB uses Postgres's internal transaction IDs which we'd have to investigate for the specific flavor of Postgres you're using.