CockroachDB fares well on the distributed side of the spectrum, and thus shows all the best properties of this kind of systems: replication, resiliency, horizontal scalability, modern ops experience.

This is no small feat, and - personally - I am sold on it. Yet, looking at its benchmarks (pre 2.0), and knowing how carelessly some enterprise software is written, how would I convince a pointy haired boss to leave the practically monolithic mega-pumped Oracle RAC server he is accustomed to, and go down the distributed route?

You've to appeal to their spreadsheets. Generally, lower costs.

If Oracle is well-established, it's going to be tough. It isn't just the cost of Oracle and doing business with them, it's the cost of all the work associated with making the transition. Code-rewrites, retraining ops, and so on.

If there's an opportunity for a greenfield, small project that would benefit from having a distributed backend then try that. Be prepared to show that it's not just low-cost, but it is easier to implement.

qiuyesuifeng

This is a fairly good point. Personally, I believe this also opens a debate about open source software VS proprietary software. Customers of proprietary software companies usually have minimal influence on the priorities and timelines of where/when the product is going. Not to mention the opacity which makes it unable to modify the code or debug it effectively. Most of the time when an issue occurs, you are faced with unclear error codes/messages/documents. If there is no existing workaround or patch, you have to wait until your issue climbs up to the top of the vendor's priority list. Whereas in the open source community, many eyes are examing the source code and many hands (including yourself) are ready to jump in all the time, making it more possible that more bugs are exposed and quicker to get a fix or workaround.

If you are open to trying other options, TiDB (https://github.com/pingcap/tidb) is also a good choice. A use case is just published on Datanami today: https://www.datanami.com/2018/02/22/hybrid-database-capturin...