Feedback: AS OF SYSTEM TIME does not make relationship clear to enterprise-license-only follower reads

[hand-crdb]

Page: https://cockroachlabs.com/docs/v23.2/as-of-system-time.html

What is the reason for your feedback?

[X] Missing the information I need

[ ] Too complicated

[ ] Out of date

[ ] Something is broken

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Additional details

Whether on this page, or on the page on follower reads, it would be good to discuss the fact that follower reads require an enterprise license and are NOT done without an enterprise license. The AS OF SYSTEM TIME syntax performs a historical read, which returns correct results in both cases. But CockroachDB has the option (not guaranteed) to implement that historical read as a follower read only if it has a license.

If the license is not present, then only the leaseholder will serve that read. In that case you will not get the following benefits:

• (usually) reduced query latency
• (usually) reduced contention