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Apples to oranges, really. Cockroach presents a single database view that happens to be sharded and replicated in a fault-tolerant, consistent way. ActorDB doesn't.

With ActorDB you have to design your data model to shard at a high level. For example, you could shard it by user; every user would have its own database that ActorDB will shard and replicate for you. That database is for the most part separate from everything else -- it has its own tables and indexes.

ActorDB provides tools to operate on multiple actors, but they're explicit. For example, you can query across multiple actors, but this requires a small SQL declaration at the beginning of the query to select which actors to query, a bit like a "for each <actors> do <some SQL>".

You can also do transactions across multiple actors, though this uses two-phase commit (which coincidentally is the strategy used by Google Spanner), and requires some locking.

So Cockroach pretends to be a classic RDBMS (databases have tables and indexes, but most apps just use a single database per app), allowing an existing app to be ported with little effort. It would be harder to port an app to ActorDB.



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