Product

As a CockroachDB Tech Writer, when I document a new feature, generally, I first try to learn the business value behind it, then I test the feature thoroughly, and then I try to write up concise, informative guidance for users. Sometimes, the business value and usage aren’t unique to CockroachDB (it’s a SQL database, after all, and SQL has been around for a while). Other times, I get to document capabilities so novel and powerful that straight-up user documentation just doesn’t seem enough.

Update on June 17, 2020: since initially publishing this post in 2017, we’ve now completed full support for Active Record. Also, CockroachDB does now fully support Common Table Expressions. In our first blog post on ORM support, Cuong Do detailed how we provided support for Hibernate, a full-featured Java ORM, in CockroachDB. He also discussed our general motivation for providing support for popular ORMs in CockroachDB: to make it as easy as possible for developers to build applications with CockroachDB using a variety of languages and frameworks.

A version of this blog post was originally published on May 1, 2017 and has been modified to provide the newest information available. With the recent 1.0 release, CockroachDB is now a production-ready database. 1.0 showcases the core capabilities of CockroachDB, while also offering users improved performance and stability with a cloud-native architecture that flexibly supports all manner of cloud deployments. It encompasses the core features that allow our users to run CockroachDB successfully in production. Now that the dust has settled on our 1.0 release, I wanted to share how we defined our target use case and dive into the actual product features that support running that use case in production.

Join the Cockroach Labs founders for an unscripted conversation about the dirty details building 1.0 and in achieving consensus across three co-founders. What do they wish they could have made it into the 1.0 release? What are they most excited about in this production-ready release? And what happens when they disagree with each other?

Jessica Edwards

May 11, 2017

Today, we are pleased to announce the release of CockroachDB 1.0, the first open source, cloud-native SQL database. We’re also announcing a series B fundraise from investors who share our vision. The launch of 1.0 marks our graduation from beta to a production-ready database, designed to power business at any scale from the startup to the enterprise. A brief introduction is in order. While databases aren’t generally considered the most thrilling subject in technology news, ignoring them would be a mistake. Understanding the ongoing evolution of databases brings into focus a ruthless arms race between what businesses need to do with data, and what existing technologies struggle to provide. The most insistent pressures have forced databases alternatively to become faster, bigger, and more reliable. Then again: faster, bigger, and more reliable. And the cycle continues.

Spencer Kimball

May 10, 2017

Scaling effortlessly over multiple nodes is one of the defining properties of CockroachDB. By maintaining a strongly-consistent database state across a network of machines, the distributed system can provide reliability and availability, while transparently tolerating disk, machine, and even datacenter failures. But not everyone has access to a datacenter at their fingertips, so we recently began looking into what it would take to run CockroachDB on a Raspberry Pi, one of the go-to tools of the modern day computer tinkerer.

``` We introduced Cockroach Labs last June with a simple yet ambitious mission: Make Data Easy. ``` We’ve spent the intervening months moving CockroachDB from an alpha stage product to launching CockroachDB beta. In the process, the team has nearly tripled in size and development has accelerated to a blistering pace. We’ve supplemented our original investment led by Peter Fenton of Benchmark with an additional round of funding, led by Mike Volpi of Index Ventures. We’re lucky to also count GV (formerly Google Ventures), Sequoia, FirstMark, and Work–Bench as investors.

Spencer Kimball

March 30, 2016

Today we’re excited to announce the release of CockroachDB 21.1, the latest version of our distributed SQL database. For this release, we took a step back and asked how we can make even more development teams successful with multi-region clusters. Thousands of engineering hours and Github tickets later, the result of our efforts is a dramatically simpler and more accessible developer experience for managing the location of data.

Meagan Goldman

February 7, 2024

Today we released CockroachDB 22.1, which helps you build better with less effort, at every stage of your application lifecycle. Choosing the right database can be a difficult balance of planning for now versus the future. Often you need to make tradeoffs—you might start quickly on Postgres or a similar cloud service, but down the road your database hits bottlenecks as your audience scales. Or you might invest time upfront learning an unnecessarily complex platform that promises future success.

Meagan Goldman

March 4, 2024