I'm in no special position to interpret Hacker News rules/guidelines, but I can say that I find pretty much all posts like this from Cockroach Labs to be super interesting and worth my time, if for no other reason than because CockroachDB is one of the most interesting things happening in the world of databases at the moment. I'd say much the same of its distant, MySQL-flavoured cousin, TiDB, but I don't see nearly as much written about that. I guess this mostly just reflects a lower emphasis on marketing by PingCAP... but if the equivalent content did exist I'd be up-voting it just the same.
So while the reason Cockroach Labs employees are paid to write these articles might ultimately be marketing, they're far from being what I'd consider marketing fluff pieces, and so it feels to me that they're at least as much "for curiosity" as they are "for promotion".
Again, I'm in no special position to interpret the rules, but I find it hard to object to the content itself, and I figure most articles like this are going to get posted here eventually anyway. Would proper Hacker News etiquette be to wait for someone not affiliated with Cockroach Labs to post it?
Ehh, if they were posting stupid marketing content, yeah I agree. But they are posting mostly technical articles that are very informative and interesting if you follow the DB (which I do, loosely, and almost used it in production but another DB ended up winning out).
I like seeing stuff like this and I don't view it as promotion (or if it is, it's 10% promotion and 90% technical content).
ScyllaDB. I was replacing a high-write Postgres instance (10% creations, 90% updates), and was testing out a drop-in replacement that could "just scale." CRDB did wonderfully, but ultimately I decided to rearchitect the problem to fit more of a CRDT model (albeit a crappy version) and just throw an endless stream of events at the DB which get reconstructed when the data is pulled out.
The model ended up working fantastically well, and I can't say enough about how much I like ScyllaDB so far. I will say I wish there was an easier backup method, but I understand that's a big ask on a distributed DB and automating our backups wasn't that difficult.
Most blog posts are marketing efforts. I think the test is whether the article provides value. I have a pretty okay background in this field and found it interesting.
Alot more posts than people think on here are actually ads and are manipulated to the top. Fast.ai used to do this all the time. I used to try and fight it/expose it, now I just move on to the next post.
