I think some of the value of Cockroach Serverless may depend on what the RUs (request units) map to. Looking at some competitors...<p>Google says that Cloud Spanner should get you around 7,000 read queries per second and 1,800 write queries per second for $650/mo. If a simple indexed read is 1 RU, $650 on Cockroach Serverless would get you around 2,500 reads/second. Of course, I think it's completely reasonable for a Serverless option to cost a bit more given that you'd need to over-provision Cloud Spanner (even if you smartly increased/decreased the amount of compute allocated based on demand).<p>Planet Scale charges $15 per 100M rows read and $15 per 10M rows written. If an RU is a row read, then Cockroach Serverless would be $10 per 100M rows read. If a write takes 10 RUs, Cockroach would cost $10 per 10M rows written. Both of those would be less than Planet Scale's cost - but it's possible that a row read will cost more than 1 RU. Let's say that an indexed lookup of a row costs 5 RUs. Then Cockroach Serverless starts costing 3.3x more than Planet Scale.<p>AWS DynamoDB charges $1.25 per million write request units and $0.25 per million read request units. If I can get 10M reads from Cockroach Serverless for $1 and 4M reads from DynamoDB for $1, Cockroach's pricing looks pretty good. Of course, if I need 5 RUs to do an indexed read, the pricing doesn't look as good anymore.<p>I do respect Cockroach Labs somewhat ambiguous description here. Planet Scale's $15 per 10M rows written feels like something that could become bad. What if I define hundreds of indexes on the table? What if I'm inserting very large blob/text columns that are 50MB in size? Likewise, what if I index no columns and end up forcing a full table scan, but only 10 rows are returned? Do they consider that I "read" 10 rows or "read" all the rows in the table? If it's the former, I'm putting a lot of strain on their system without paying for it. If it's the latter, I'm going to just define indexes that might not be worth it if I were paying for the IO needed to do all that writing.<p>Still, it would be nice if Cockroach Labs offered some indication of what could be accomplished with 1 RU. "An indexed read of 1 row or an indexed read of a few rows in sequence; for example, 'SELECT * FROM people WHERE age > 18 ORDER BY age, name LIMIT 10' where there exists an index on (age, name)." That would let me know what to expect. "A write of a row under 4KB in size with no secondary indexes will cost 3 RUs; expect secondary indexes to increase the cost by 1 RU each" would give me an idea of what's going on.<p>I think there are definitely cases that one can't easily enumerate. For example, "UPDATE people SET age = 18 WHERE EXISTS (SELECT * FROM legacy_info WHERE people.id = legacy_info.people_id AND legacy_info.is_adult = true)". That's potentially going to require lots of stuff that's harder to predict. However, at this point I don't know if an indexed read of a row costs 1 RU or 10 RU. If an indexed read of a single row costs 1 RU, if I read 10 rows sequentially will that mean 10 RUs or will 1 RU have enough IO to cover that since they're sequential (or will the billing just over-charge since there's tangibly more rows and that's easy to explain)?<p>I think a decent amount of the value depends on the pricing and it's hard to judge that right now.<p>One thing I will note is that the storage seems expensive. It's slightly cheaper than Planet Scale, but a lot more than the $0.30/GB of Cloud Spanner or the $0.23/GB of FaunaDB or $0.25/GB of DynamoDB. I've been wondering a bit about the storage pricing of Planet Scale since $1.25/GB seems expensive. Cockroach Serverless is coming in at $1/GB which also seems expensive compared compared to alternatives. If Cloud Spanner is basically offering a third the price, is the "Serverless" flexibility worth it given that Spanner can be scaled up/down pretty easily in very granular increments.<p>Actually, one thing that could be useful might be noting how many request units per month one of the dedicated instances would have. A 2 vCPU CockroachDB instance costs $350-400. Would that be 4 billion request units per month (assuming you were fully utilizing the box)? Would it be more like 15 billion request units per month since you're presumably paying a premium for the Serverless flexibility?