Most of the bad things I can think up of about cockroaches are good in the context of databases. Replication, being hard to kill, being around for ages, collective decision-making..
As someone downthread said, it's not a consumer product and doesn't need to be marketed like one.
I remember the urban legend meme that cockroaches could survive anything, even nuclear war.
I also used to live somewhere that we’d occasionally see a cockroach, and they’re disgusting. Any time I hear the word cockroach, immediately it reminds me of the times I was going to the bathroom and looked up to see a cockroach, jumping back in surprise. It’s a much stronger emotion attached to the word. Just immediate feeling of disgust.
I wouldn’t mind working on a project that uses cockroachDB if it really is the best tool for the job, but I do feel a little weird about it. And the name has kept me from really looking into it previously...
I scoffed at first, but I guess cockroach sounds to some what "maggot" sounds like to me.
Like the other person said, it's related to the survivability of cockroaches. One can hope for a management tier competent enough to evaluate an internal database on the merits.
Fun fact: the supposed extreme hardiness of cockroaches is something of a myth, and in particular they are not fond of cold (hence their affinity for human domiciles!)
CockroachDB at least refers to their marketing line of "almost impossible to kill/take down" and the way it scales to many servers. There are few less gross insects they could have used though like Bees or Ants.
That connotation seems obvious but I didn't pick up on it until months after I heard about CockroachDB. For one, a minority of people who know about cockroaches know about their resilience. For two, people who _do_ know that still know that cockroaches are disgusting. The reptile brain is going to react with revulsion even if the higher brain finds the metaphor.
A counterpoint: my home has a roach infestation and I killed two today and... I must say I love this name.
When I think about cockroaches the first thing that comes to mind is that they will surely outlive us. I don't want my data storage to be pretty, I want it to survive hardware failures and outlast pretty much everything.
I hate(fear?) cockroaches with the entirety of my being, especially the flying variant. As a child, a cockroach once bit my toe. That's one times too many. I immediately grab the nearest hard object I can find to slay these F#$%^ERS. I've also heard stories of cockroaches entering people's ears (EWW!).
That said, I have no problem with the name CockroachDB whatsoever.
I don't think its just that it has a bug in its name. I would venture to guess that if the name was Wasp DB, this issue wouldn't exist. It has more to do with the disgust trigger that many people have when they think of cockroaches.
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