From Day One, our goal has been to bring together the benefits of both SQL and NoSQL, using a cloud-native, distributed architecture. But what we have accomplished for our customers over the past 10 years is only the beginning.

Spencer Kimball

February 18, 2025

In the past decade, we’ve helped our customers push the envelope to lead in their respective markets, with data architectures that can seamlessly survive node outages, datacenter outages, regional cloud outages, and even the unprecedented ability to turn off a cloud vendor entirely with complete business continuity. We are agnostic to public vs private cloud, allowing zero-downtime portability, and public / private hybrid deployments. All while leaving the door open to the future repatriation of data – after all, the only guarantee is that business requirements will continue to evolve in hard-to-predict ways. Our ability to meet these and other challenges is the number one reason why CockroachDB has become the trusted global database for running the mission-critical workloads of the world’s most important businesses.

Spencer Kimball

August 15, 2024

We have officially started our expansion in India, marking a significant milestone in our global growth strategy. The move to India reflects our continued recognition of global talent and the country’s immense strategic potential to position our distributed SQL database to be used across the world.

Spencer Kimball

June 30, 2023

At Cockroach Labs, the past year has been filled with some extraordinary transformations. Today I’m pleased to mark another milestone, as we showcase our business acceleration and expansion, customer growth, and a new addition to our executive team. We started this company as a small team frustrated with the lack of sophisticated database technology in the open source ecosystem. Since then, CockroachDB has helped some of the world’s best companies power their mission-critical workloads with a level of sophistication worthy of the promise of the global cloud. It has been exhilarating to see CockroachDB evolve into a product adopted by innovators in the Fortune 500.

Spencer Kimball

March 22, 2023

Cockroaches first evolved more than 300M years ago, and yet the O.G. is still recognizable. "Modern" cockroaches are about 200M years old; that they're still with us, largely unchanged, is quite impressive from an evolutionary perspective.

Spencer Kimball

May 20, 2022

The design of CockroachDB is based on Google’s Spanner data storage system. One of the most surprising and inspired facets of Spanner is its use of atomic clocks and GPS clocks to give participating nodes really accurate wall time synchronization. The designers of Spanner call this “TrueTime”, and it provides a tight bound on clock offset between any two nodes in the system. This lets them do pretty nifty things! We’ll elaborate on a few of these below, but chief among them is their ability to leverage tightly synchronized clocks to provide a high level of external consistency (we’ll explain what this is). If someone knows even a little about Spanner, one of the first questions they have is: “You can’t be using atomic clocks if you’re building an open source database; so how the heck does CockroachDB work?”

Spencer Kimball

January 27, 2022

Today marks a significant milestone for Cockroach Labs. We are announcing our most recent round of funding, raising significant capital at a $5B valuation. This latest round of funding is a reflection of our customers’ rapid advances in production deployments, supporting the growth of our business.

Spencer Kimball

December 16, 2021

It’s been over six years since CockroachDB became a GitHub project. In that time, the project has racked up more than 20,000 GitHub stars, which is a simple way for GitHub users to bookmark repositories that interest them. Naturally, we’ve wondered how people find out about our project. Are there things we could do to accelerate awareness and interest?

Spencer Kimball

February 22, 2021

Since January 28, 2020, the EU has issued $192 million (€158.5 million) in fines for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) violations (DLA Piper, Engadget). Although companies have had years to become fully GDPR compliant, compliance is not easy. After the GDPR took effect in 2018, we had a conversation with Cockroach Labs co-founder and CEO Spencer Kimball on the topic, who detailed the nuances of the law and what companies should do to comply within the context of their databases. This is a recap of that conversation from 2018.

Spencer Kimball

January 19, 2021