In order to learn how to use CockroachDB with a JPA provider like Hibernate, let’s build a Spring Boot application that stores details of video game leaderboards in a CockroachDB database hosted on the CockroachDB Serverless platform.

To show how easy it is to use CockroachDB in a real-world project, we’re going to build and deploy a production-ready application with basic CRUD functionality. Together, we’ll build a Ruby on Rails application that simulates a game leaderboard, using Active Record to talk with our CockroachDB Serverless database. Cockroach Labs maintains the ActiveRecord Adapter Gem, a direct extension of the PostgreSQL adapter. This makes it very straightforward to switch from a default option to CockroachDB. We’ll be using Ruby 3.0 to build a Rails app running Rails version 6.1.4. At the end of the tutorial, we’ll deploy the application to the internet on Heroku, which is running on AWS behind the scenes.

CockroachDB is a distributed relational database that enables users to scale their application and production software without hardware limitations. CockroachDB Serverless is the fastest way to get started using this relational database. It only takes two steps: sign up using your GitHub account, then connect your cluster using the connection information relevant to your system’s operating system. Integrating CockroachDB into a Django application is seamless thanks to its feature-rich object-relational mapping (ORM) that lets us interact with the database using a fluent object-oriented API.

In this article, we’re building a full-stack web app that simulates a game leaderboard. The idea is to make it as simple as possible — one page to display the leaderboard listing and another to add new leaderboard entries. As a Python developer, you are likely familiar with the language’s simplicity. You can choose from various web development frameworks, but if you’re aiming for an uncomplicated Python web app, then Flask is your friend.

To help people get outdoors and improve their physical well-being, we’ll create an outdoor activity tracker. Although we won’t cover aspects such as user management, the app will have an input page where users can enter activities such as hiking, skating, swimming, and soccer, with details such as date, duration, distance, and a description. The application’s activities page will list activities from the database and let users sort by fields like date, distance, and duration.

As cloud-native web developers, we want to build apps that scale easily. Databases are often a pain point, though. We want the structure and data integrity of relational databases like PostgreSQL, but we also want the easy scalability of NoSQL databases like MongoDB. Until recently, we’ve been forced to choose one or the other. Fortunately, CockroachDB provides the best of both worlds. It’s a robust relational database with full SQL support and all of the features you’d expect in an enterprise-ready database. It supports the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so you can use it with most tools and libraries that support Postgres. But that’s not all: it offers excellent scalability, so you no longer have to choose between relational data integrity or NoSQL scalability. And, if you use CockroachDB Serverless, you don’t have to worry about hosting and scaling a database yourself — so you can focus your efforts on building great apps. This tutorial will show you how to start from scratch and build a modern cloud-native web app using TypeScript, React, Prisma, Netlify serverless functions, and CockroachDB.