Which is worse...? One of your users goes to check her bank balance in your app, and the service is down, or, One of your users goes to check her bank balance in your app and there's a data inconsistency. Engineers are frequently faced with this false tradeoff: do you place a higher premium on data correctness, or high availability? This problem only becomes more complicated when you begin dealing with users distributed across broad geographies. When IT experts consider high availability infrastructure for mission-critical services, their minds often leap to Oracle as the preeminent service provider. But Oracle's database was designed in a pre-cloud world, and the means by which it achieves high availability on geo-distributed workloads are complex. Oracle requires a staggering number of technologies that must be implemented, and still, their solutions can allow potentially costly anomalies into your data. As a cloud native database, CockroachDB introduces a new way of providing always-on availability, strong data consistency, and distributed performance. Today, we're releasing a side-by-side comparison of CockroachDB and Oracle to help you get a better understanding of the architecture (and cost) of setting up a highly available distributed service.