As a leading distributed SQL database, CockroachDB, provides a number of capabilities to allow organizations and users to recover from disaster. Physical Cluster Replication, or PCR for short, is one such feature that enables operators to add "warm standby" clusters to their most critical CockroachDB deployments as an added layer of resilience and disaster preparedness in what is often called an "active-passive" configuration.

David Taylor

February 10, 2025

This is part 1 of a 3-part blog series about how we’ve improved the way CockroachDB stores and modifies data in bulk. We went way down into the deepest layers of our storage system, then up to our SQL schema changes and their transaction timestamps - all without anybody noticing (or at least we hope!)

David Taylor

January 18, 2023

Last year the BulkIO team at Cockroach Labs replaced the implementation of our IMPORT bulk-loading feature with a simpler and faster data ingestion pipeline. In most of our tests, it looked like a major improvement: the release notes for CockroachDB v19.2 touted "4x faster" IMPORT. Many a 🎉 reaction was clicked, and the team moved on to new projects. But over the following months, it became clear we had celebrated too soon: we started to get reports of some IMPORTs that, instead of being faster, were much slower or even getting stuck. Armed with a test that could reproduce such a case, we started to dig.

David Taylor

October 13, 2020