We are pleased to announce that our second paper, Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB, will appear in the Industry Track of the ACM SIGMOD 2022 conference in Philadelphia, PA (as well as remotely), on June 12-17. This paper is the sequel to our SIGMOD 2020 paper in which we introduced CockroachDB’s geo-distributed capabilities to the world.
What is SIGMOD?
SIGMOD is a leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. We are excited to share our recent work on Multi-Region support in CockroachDB at the conference, and we’re also thrilled to be one of SIGMOD’s sponsors this year.
What is in CockroachDB’s new SIGMOD paper?
In our new paper, we describe support for multi-region database deployments in CockroachDB. Configuring a database deployed across multiple regions such that it meets the consistency, performance, and availability goals of modern applications requires significant expertise. CockroachDB makes this easy for developers by providing a high-level declarative syntax that allows expressing data access locality and availability goals through SQL statements. These high-level goals are then mapped to database configuration, replica placement, and data partitioning decisions. In the paper we demonstrate how all layers of the database, from the SQL Optimizer to Transactions and Replication, were enhanced to support multi-region workloads.
One of the innovations we’re excited about, described in the paper, is a new Transaction Management protocol that enables local, strongly consistent reads from any database replica.
The paper also includes an extensive evaluation demonstrating that CockroachDB’s new declarative SQL syntax for multi-region clusters is easy to use and supports a variety of configuration options with different performance tradeoffs to benefit a variety of workloads. We show that throughput scales linearly with the number of regions, and the new Transaction Management protocol reduces tail latency by over 10x compared to prior approaches.
How to learn more about the paper
Our new paper, which can be found here, is truly a company-wide team effort, with co-authors representing many areas of engineering at Cockroach Labs, such as Transactions and Distribution, SQL Queries, SQL Experience, and Product. One of the authors, Peyton Walters, contributed to the project during a summer internship, and continued to work with us on the paper after returning to university. He will soon re-join Cockroach Labs as a full-time engineer.
Nathan Vanbenschoten will present the paper at the conference on Thursday, June 16, and the talk is also going to be made available online. In addition, our Senior Director of Engineering, Adam Storm, will talk about the tech, the culture, and of course the name of Cockroach Labs during the Sponsor Session 3 on Friday at 9 am EST.
We’re also excited to participate in VLDB 2022, where we will showcase CockroachDB’s new multi-region support as part of VLDB’s Demo Track.
We hope to see you all at SIGMOD and VLDB this year!
