Product

At Cockroach Labs, we want to give you a database that allows you to quickly and simply build and manage data-intensive applications in the cloud—without worrying about the performance, scale or resilience of those apps. To support that mission, our latest release includes updates that let you build fast and build to last.

Cockroach Labs was founded on a hypothesis: modern, cloud-native applications will need a new type of database built on a distributed architecture to provide bulletproof resilience and elastic, effortless scale, and we can deliver it. We’ve been humbled and encouraged to see validation of our hypothesis over the past four years, from buzz and feedback on Hacker News, to open source adoption, to Github stars. Since launching our commercial product in 2018, we’ve seen companies large and small (including Equifax, Bose, and Comcast) adopt CockroachDB as their database of choice for mission-critical applications. And in the last twelve months, we’ve seen our first-year customers on average more than double the size of their CockroachDB deployments.

* As of CockroachDB 23.1 we no longer use the duplicate indexes topology pattern. Instead, we use global tables. When you’re distributing a SQL database geographically, it can be tough to get fast application performance. Data often has to make long, round trip journeys across the world and is restricted by a speed limit (the speed of light).

Piyush Singh

April 14, 2020

Back in 2015 the early Cockroach Labs engineers made a decision to write this massive, complex application in Go. Since then we have, on many occassions, discussed our use of Go in blogs and on stage.

Dan Kelly

March 18, 2020

I ended an amazing internship this past fall on the KV (Key-Value) team at Cockroach Labs (responsible for the transaction, distribution and replication layers of CockroachDB). This blog post delves into my work on adding native support for creating hash sharded indexes in CockroachDB, as a way to significantly improve performance on sequential workloads. CockroachDB uses range partitioning by default, as opposed to hash partitioning. As explained in our CTO Peter Mattis’s blog post, a key-value store with range partitioning resembles a distributed balanced tree whereas one with hash partitioning is closer to a distributed hash map. In particular, range partitioning outperforms hash partitioning for the most common SQL workloads like range scans. However, load under range partitioning can become imbalanced for access patterns that focus on a specific range of data, since all traffic is served by a small subset of all the ranges. Sequential insert traffic is a common example of such an access pattern and is much better suited to hash partitioning.

As of jOOQ's 3.13.0 release, jOOQ fully supports CockroachDB. The CockroachDB SQL dialect is now fully supported for future jOOQ and CockroachDB versions.

Django is a high-level flexible framework for building Python applications quickly. Applications run on Django store data, by default, into a SQLite database file, but lots of Django users find themselves needing to switch to a more performant database in production, one with better availability or scalability.

``` Django includes a full-featured ORM that simplifies interactions with a database--it’s one of the reasons it’s become one of the most popular web frameworks. Even so, you’re still left to manage scale yourself, and ensure the database is resilient and always on. That can be really hard to do with common Django databases like Postgres, SQLite, and MySQL. And that’s why today, we’re excited to announce a new CockroachDB backend for the Django ORM. ``` Using CockroachDB and Django gives you the ease of writing in Python while getting all the benefits of an open source, distributed SQL database. CockroachDB shards automatically, is naturally resilient, and is highly available. Here’s how to get started:

Yugabyte frequently compares themselves to CockroachDB. We investigated their claims. This is our analysis of CockroachDB vs. Yugabyte v2.0.0.

Peter Mattis

November 19, 2019