When you're building a transport operations platform to optimize global fleets, "good enough" isn't good enough.
Nexxiot, a TradeTech pioneer, tracks the movement and condition of unpowered freight assets — railcars, shipping containers, and more — using solar-powered IoT devices that function reliably for over six years in the field. Their mission: to make transportation safer, more efficient, and more sustainable.
For this mission, Nexxiot needed a database as resilient and global as their business. What they didn't have was a massive team or unlimited budget. "We wanted a database that just runs," says Alexander Berger, Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Nexxiot. "We didn't want to be caught up managing upgrades, babysitting clusters, or worrying about uptime."
Their solution was CockroachDB — a distributed SQL database built for global scale, continuous availability, and zero-ops resilience that proved ideal for Nexxiot's mission-critical platform.
From startup simplicity to global-scale challenges
In their early days, Nexxiot relied on DynamoDB as its primary datastore, with Elasticsearch handling queries. This setup was quick to deploy and light on maintenance — perfect for a lean team finding their footing. As their device network expanded and customer expectations grew, cracks started showing.
Read-heavy workloads pushed Elasticsearch to its limits, while DynamoDB's lack of transactional consistency introduced risk. "If a service crashed between two related updates, we'd end up with inconsistent data," Berger explains. Basic business questions required writing custom programs — sometimes taking days or weeks to generate results that should have been a simple SQL query.
When Nexxiot explored alternatives like Amazon RDS, they discovered these "managed" options still demanded significant operational attention. "When a major version upgrade came along, we were handed what amounted to a thousand-page runbook," Berger recalls. "That just wasn't feasible with our three-person team."
The requirements had crystallized: Nexxiot needed a horizontally scalable, always-available SQL database that demanded minimal operational overhead.
Choosing CockroachDB: Modern SQL without compromise
By 2018, Berger's team had narrowed their options to a short list of distributed SQL databases. "We thoroughly evaluated TiDB, Yugabyte, and CockroachDB," he says. "It came down to which solution could truly deliver horizontal scaling, strong consistency, and cloud-native operations without compromise. CockroachDB clearly stood out."
They were particularly impressed by its multi-region capabilities, robust support for ACID transactions, and PostgreSQL compatibility. For a team without resources to manage complex infrastructure, CockroachDB Cloud Advanced (formerly CockroachDB Dedicated) fit perfectly. With this fully managed service, Cockroach Labs handles day-to-day operations, maintenance, and infrastructure management, freeing Nexxiot's devs to focus on building applications rather than wrestling with database administration.
Berger emphasizes that the decision wasn't about following conventional wisdom — it was about selecting the right tool for their specific constraints and ambitions. "We had zero interest in making the 'safe' choice just for its own sake. We needed a database that worked out of the box and could scale with us globally."
A thoughtful transition with immediate impact
Rather than attempting a high-risk "big bang" migration, Nexxiot took a more measured approach. "We introduced CockroachDB alongside our existing stack," says Berger. "Then, as different teams worked on their systems, we encouraged them to migrate when the opportunity arose."
This low-pressure adoption strategy allowed the company to transition at a sustainable pace while realizing early benefits. Developers embraced the familiar SQL interface, SREs appreciated no longer being on-call for database issues, and most importantly, Nexxiot's customers noticed the platform's improved reliability and responsiveness.
Over time, CockroachDB became the backbone for Nexxiot's core services, including device metadata management, processed sensor data storage, customer-facing queries, and sophisticated geospatial tracking.
A resilient, multi-region architecture
Today, Nexxiot operates dedicated CockroachDB clusters in both Europe and North America, ensuring compliance with regional data sovereignty requirements while optimizing for latency. "We maintain separate clusters by continent," Berger explains. "This approach lets us demonstrate to regulators and customers that their data stays exactly where it should."
These clusters power several essential logistics capabilities:
Real-time global asset tracking and tracing
Storage and access of processed IoT data for operational applications
Geospatial data indexing that drives interactive maps and route playback features
Nexxiot's devices wake at regular intervals, transmitting GPS coordinates, temperature readings, and shock data through a Kafka-compatible streaming layer (Redpanda). The processed information lands in CockroachDB, enhanced with spatial indexes that enable rapid location-based queries. Users can view asset locations, historical routes, and critical alerts — all updated in near real-time.
One particularly valuable implementation: precise mileage reporting for rail operators. In countries like Germany, accurately documented mileage directly affects subsidy eligibility. "Simple straight-line GPS points don't reflect actual travel distances," notes Berger. "We use map-matching to 'snap' those points to the real rail networks, then store that path data in CockroachDB. That level of precision translates directly to financial benefits for our customers."
Operations that stay out of the spotlight
The most telling benefit of CockroachDB may be how rarely Berger's team thinks about it. "In our entire time using it, we've never experienced a database outage," he says. "Any downtime we've seen has stemmed from issues in our application code — never from CockroachDB itself."
Upgrades happen seamlessly, availability remains consistent, and scaling is predictable. Even major version updates occur without manual intervention or drama. "This is the only database I've used where upgrades don't feel like rolling the dice," Berger says.
Alexander Berger is Principal Site Reliability Engineer for Nexxiot.
Strategic database insights
For teams contemplating their own database strategy, Berger offers straightforward guidance:
If you need a transactional, globally scalable OLTP system, CockroachDB deserves serious consideration.
For intensive analytics workloads, plan for complementary systems. Nexxiot pairs CockroachDB for transactional data with specialized data lakes for analytical processing.
Invest early in the right foundation. "Your database will outlive most of your code," Berger states. "Choose poorly, and you're stuck with that decision for a decade or more."
Aim for infrastructure that fades into the background: "Throughout my career, I've worked with Oracle, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB — you name it," adds Berger. "CockroachDB is the first database that doesn't keep me up at night. It hasn't let us down once."
Ready for future horizons
As Nexxiot continues expanding their customer base and feature set, CockroachDB scales in perfect lockstep. Whether they're adding new device types, entering additional regions, or exploring advanced integrations, their data foundation remains high-performing, dependable, and refreshingly low-maintenance.
For a company built on visibility, trust, and uncompromising uptime, that makes all the difference. CockroachDB’s resilience frees Nexxiot to focus on more strategic innovations. "We don't deal with downtime, we don't need complex runbooks," Berger concludes. "It just works."
See how distributed SQL can power always-on, globally distributed infrastructure without the operational overhead: Talk to an expert today.
David Weiss is Senior Technical Content Marketer for Cockroach Labs.
