A few months ago Cockroach Labs turned 10, and this release celebrates 10 years of continuous distributed SQL innovation. We’re introducing even more performance and scalability improvements and AI vector indexing, along with many other new features and enhancements to both self-hosted and cloud offerings in the areas of change data capture (CDC), security, observability, and migrations.
CockroachDB v25.2 is the most performant, scalable, and secure version of CockroachDB yet. My favorite new feature highlights of this release include:
Performance improvements: 50% increased throughput and more
We’ve achieved 50% increased throughput as compared to 24.3 as measured on average across nine workloads. These performance improvements are the result of over 100 changes, both large and small, including new features like generic query plans (now in GA).
Buffered writes (now in Preview). Buffered writes is an under-the-covers way to improve performance by bundling up database writes more efficiently to increase throughput and decrease latency, while also reducing hardware requirements. Buffered writes performance improvements are not counted towards the 50% improvement discussed earlier because it’s still a preview feature and the default setting for buffered writes is ‘off’.
Buffered writes introduces a new step in the transaction flow, which temporarily stores transaction writes on the client side (gateway) until the transaction commits. This approach minimizes the number of roundtrips to the leaseholders, reduces pipeline stalls, and allows for the passive use of the 1-phase commit fast-path. By deferring writes until commit time, the system can reduce redundant writes and serve read-your-writes locally, resulting in performance gains that in our tests range from 15% (Sysbench oltp_read_write) to 40% (customer-specific testing) improvements.
Database restore enhancements. Improvements to the database restore capabilities have led to an increase in up to 4x the speed when restoring from backup for some restore use cases.
Vector indexing is in Preview for AI applications at scale
In 24.2 we released pgvector support for the vector datatype, which was a good way for customers to begin experimenting with advanced LLM applications. When we introduced pgvector support, we did so for vectors with thousands of dimensions. Now customers are moving their testing along to where performance is important.
To support performant search and discovery we are now introducing vector indexing in Preview based on a protocol we’re calling Cockroach-SPANN (or C-SPANN). C-SPANN is based on Microsoft’s SPANN and SPFRESH research papers which, along with RaBitQ, deliver an indexing method that is small, fully distributed, and easy to update without degrading index quality. We’re very excited about this release as it directly addresses scalability concerns of vector applications for customers with support for indexing billions of vectors. With vector indexing, we now make it even more compelling to combine the strengths of a vector database and an operational database onto a single, horizontally scalable and performant solution.
Introducing row-level security
Row-level security (released as GA) is a critical feature for large organizations in sectors such as healthcare and finance, where sensitive customer information must be meticulously protected. These organizations often have a diverse array of database users, including database administrators and application users, each requiring different levels of data access. CockroachDB provides robust mechanisms for managing roles and privileges to restrict access to specific tables, and now we are adding the capability to enforce row-level security. This means that both access to individual tables can be controlled and there is built-in functionality to restrict access to specific rows within those tables based on the user or role.
Row-level security ensures sensitive data is protected and access to the data is tightly controlled. With row-level security customers also now have better tenant isolation to protect their customer information within a single table without relying upon application level constraints.
Enhanced observability: We now enable organizations to gain more insights into their workloads to improve overall performance. Capabilities include generating work-load level index recommendations to improve performance, finer-grained SQL metrics, and comprehensive hotspot logs.
New CockroachDB Cloud regions and plan switching without downtime
New CockroachDB Cloud regions: There are two new GCP regions and two new AWS regions to support customer deployments with even richer region support to help keep your data as close to your client applications as possible. For the full list of regions supported, check out the docs.
CockroachDB Cloud plan switching: With plan switching, customers deploying CockroachDB as a managed service will now have complete flexibility in the plans they choose, and switching between them as their needs evolve. Plan switching enables customers to easily scale workloads up or down without added downtime based on application scale and security needs. This helps to avoid plan lock-in, and lets customers select their plan tiers based on evolving needs and lessons learned. Plan switching currently supports Basic to Standard (and the reverse), with Standard to Advanced (and the reverse) coming out soon.
To see the full list of features and improvements in v25.2 and our Cloud offering head over to the “what’s new” landing page.
