Which has still horrible join performance, and several other tradeoffs. (see https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdbs-first-join/)

Maybe in a year, or two. But not today.

Spanner has a lot of tradeoffs too, I'm not sure what do you see as problematic in Cockroach, joins are good enough. The biggest tradeoffs are inherent to strongly consistent distributed systems. Even precise clocks and fast networks won't help as much as you might think. You still have to accept vastly different latencies and performance than in traditional single-node RDBMSs.

If I run several servers in the same rack, with a local private 10Gbps network, with CockroachDB, running on spinning HDDs, I expect to get the same (or better) throughput as with a single PGSQL instance, and a similar latency. (When accessing it from another server, via the public internet).

That’s not always the case, though.

That blog post is from a year ago. And since Cockroach DB 1.0 was only released in May this year, it's a bit misleading to link to that post as though it was the current state of the sofware.

That blog post is referenced in their FAQ today, under the topic of what it can't do right now. Sorry if I misunderstood the situation, I’d appreciate any updated links.

See: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/frequently-asked-q...

Ah, my apologies then. It's their fault for not updating the FAQ and you can hardly be blamed for quoting from it!

There was an update to that 6 months later: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/better-sql-joins-in-cockr...

I'd assume they've made even more improvements since, so they really should update their docs.