Cockroach Labs launches CockroachDB as managed service

Published October 30, 2018

Cockroach Lab’s open source SQL database, CockroachDB, has been making inroads since it launched last year, but as any open source technology matures, in order to move deeper into markets it has to move beyond technical early adopters to a more generalized audience. To help achieve that, the company announced a new CockroachDB managed service today.

The service has been designed to be cloud-agnostic, and for starters it’s going to be available on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Cockroach, which launched in 2015, has always positioned itself as modern cloud alternative to the likes of Oracle or even Amazon’s Aurora database.

As company co-founder and CEO Spencer Kimball told me in an interview in May, those companies involve too much vendor lock-in for his taste. His company launched as open alternative to all of that. “You can migrate a Cockroach cluster from one cloud to another with no down time,” Kimball told TechCrunch in May.

He believes having that kind of flexibility is a huge advantage over what other vendors are offering, and today’s announcement carries that a step further. Instead of doing all the heavy lifting of setting up and managing a database and the related infrastructure, Cockroach is now offering CockroachDB as a service to handle all of that for you.

Kimball certainly recognizes that by offering his company’s product in this format, it will help grow his market. “We’ve been seeing significant migration activity away from Oracle, AWS Aurora, and Cassandra, and we’re now able to get our customers to market faster with Managed CockroachDB,” Kimball said in a statement.

The database itself offers the advantage of being ultra-resilient, meaning it stays up and running under most circumstances and that’s a huge value proposition for any database product. It achieves up time through replication, so if one version of itself goes down, the next can take over.

As an open source tool, it has been making money up until now by offering an enterprise version, which includes backup, support and other premium pieces. With today’s announcement, the company can get a more direct revenue stream from customers subscribing to the database service.

A year ago, the company announced version 1.0 of CockroachDB and $27 million in Series B financing, which was led by Redpoint with participation from Benchmark, GV, Index Ventures and FirstMark. They’ve obviously been putting that money to good use developing this new managed service.

Oracle launches autonomous database for online transaction processing

Published August 7, 2018

Oracle executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison first introduced the company’s autonomous database at Oracle Open World last year. The company later launched an autonomous data warehouse. Today, it announced the next step with the launch of the Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) service.

This latest autonomous database tool promises the same level of autonomy — self-repairing, automated updates and security patches and minutes or less of downtime a month. Juan Loaiza SVP for Oracle Systems at the database giant says the ATP cloud service is a modernized extension of the online transaction processing databases (OLTP) they have been creating for decades. It has machine learning and automation underpinnings, but it should feel familiar to customers, he says.

“Most of the major companies in the world are running thousands of Oracle databases today. So one simple differentiation for us is that you can just pick up your on-premises database that you’ve had for however many years, and you can easily move it to an autonomous database in the cloud,” Loaiza told TechCrunch.

He says that companies already running OLTP databases are ones like airlines, big banks and financial services companies, online retailers and other mega companies who can’t afford even a half hour of downtime a month. He claims that with Oracle’s autonomous database, the high end of downtime is 2.5 minutes per month and the goal is to get much lower, basically nothing.

Carl Olofson, an IDC analyst who manages IDC’s database management practice says the product promises much lower operational costs and could give Oracle a leg up in the Database as a Service market. “What Oracle offers that is most significant here is the fact that patches are applied without any operational disruption, and that the database is self-tuning and, to a large degree, self-healing. Given the highly variable nature of OLTP database issues that can arise, that’s quite something,” he said.

Adam Ronthal, an analyst at Gartner who focuses on the database market, says the autonomous database product set will be an important part of Oracle’s push to the cloud moving forward. “These announcements are more cloud announcements than database announcements. They are Oracle coming out to the world with products that are built and architected for cloud and everything that implies — scalability, elasticity and a low operational footprint. Make no mistake, Oracle still has to prove themselves in the cloud. They are behind AWS and Azure and even GCP in breadth and scope of offerings. ATP helps close that gap, at least in the data management space,” he said.

Oracle certainly needs a cloud win as its cloud business has been heading in the wrong direction the last couple of earnings report to the point they stopped breaking out the cloud numbers in the June report.

Ronthal says Oracle needs to gain some traction quickly with existing customers if it’s going to be successful here. “Oracle needs to build some solid early successes in their cloud, and these successes are going to come from the existing customer base who are already strategically committed to Oracle databases and are not interested in moving. (This is not all of the customer base, of course.) Once they demonstrate solid successes there, they will be able to expand to net new customers,” he says.

Regardless how it works out for Oracle, the ATP database service will be available as of today.