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<!–– Outdated blog post alert! CockroachDB no longer stores each non-primary-key column in a separate value by default. By default, all data in a table is stored in the same column family. Gory details available here. ––!>

Peter Mattis

September 16, 2015

Editor's Note - April 23, 2021: This article was written in 2015 when CockroachDB was pre-beta. The product has evolved significantly since then. We will be updating this post to reflect the current status of CockroachDB. In the meantime, the transaction section of the Architecture Document provides a more current description of CockroachDB's transaction model.

In CockroachDB, we use the Raft consensus algorithm to ensure that your data remains consistent even when machines fail. In most systems that use Raft, such as etcd and Consul, the entire system is one Raft consensus group. In CockroachDB, however, the data is divided into ranges, each with its own consensus group. This means that each node may be participating in hundreds of thousands of consensus groups. This presents some unique challenges, which we have addressed by introducing a layer on top of Raft that we call MultiRaft.

Ben Darnell

June 12, 2015

Databases are the beating heart of every business in the world, running the gamut from humble spreadsheets to thousands of servers linked into vast supercomputers. And they’ve been evolving rapidly. Most of us at Cockroach Labs have spent our careers watching them progress, often actively struggling to overcome their limitations when the task at hand outstripped their capabilities. But first, why “Cockroach”? If you can get past their grotesque outer aspect, you’ve got to give them credit for sheer resilience. You’ve heard the theory that cockroaches will be the only survivors post-apocalypse? Turns out modern database systems have a lot to gain by emulating one of nature’s oldest and most successful designs. Survive, replicate, proliferate. That’s been the cockroach model for geological ages, and it’s ours too. It doesn’t hurt that the name itself is resilient to being forgotten.

Spencer Kimball

June 4, 2015

The creation of a truly new category within tech is a rare moment. The emergence of a significant new category that will transform the tech landscape is the result of clear vision and underlying shifts in the market. Given that innovation is a constant in tech, however, how do we identify when an emerging technology will have genuine long-term impact? How do we know there is a truly new “category”? There are three characteristics of any emerging category: Adoption and momentum: There is a building group of companies and individuals receiving and creating new value from the “new” approach. A collection of interests: There is an emerging set of best practices and general curiosity from individuals and companies around the new tech Market recognition: People spend money on it, and those that analyze industries start to track and study the new technology.

Jim Walker

March 12, 2024

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

Last fall we wrote about how CockroachDB was 50x more scalable than Amazon Aurora as evidenced on the industry-standard TPC-C benchmark. We’re pleased to announce that CockroachDB has doubled that performance benchmark by successfully passing TPC-C at 100,000 warehouses. And with a max throughput of 1.2m tpmC, CockroachDB can now process 100X the throughput of Amazon Aurora’s last published benchmark.

Andy Woods

March 13, 2024

In this blog post, we’ll explore the motivations behind the REGIONAL BY ROW abstraction, take a deeper dive into the abstraction itself, and look behind the scenes to understand how REGIONAL BY ROW works under the covers. We also have a hands-on demo for you to try out at the end, so you can play around with a toy multi-region cluster yourself!

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