Engineering

As CockroachDB approaches beta, user documentation has become increasingly important, and one of the meatiest requirements is documentation of our SQL implementation. For inspiration, I researched how other databases have documented SQL. The most effective example I found was SQLite’s grammar diagrams.

The goal of CockroachDB is to “make data easy,” and while it seems like a stretch now, we eventually want CockroachDB to be able to act as the entire state layer for web applications. We are currently addressing the SQL layer, and a full-text search like ElasticSearch is somewhere ahead on the product horizon. Since Cockroach Labs offered a flexible policy for work on experimental projects, I decided to use mine to experiment with implementing the Redis protocol on top of CockroachDB, attempting to answer the question: Could CockroachDB ever replace Redis?

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!