Cockroach Labs’ New Launch Is For Developers Managing Data

This is what Cockroach Labs' new launch has in store for developers.

Cockroach Labs' latest release is here to make things easy for developers. CockroachDB makes the deployment and management of distributed databases easier. It includes a new SQL syntax that can be entered on the command line to control the latency and availability of data for multi-region deployments.

CockroachDB 21.1 is launched as a result of a promise made by CEO Spencer Kimball during a discussion about the company's $160 million E funding round. But why the promise? Distributed transaction databases are complicated, with multiple masters. Even in the cloud, there are various approaches for relational transaction databases, but many rely on a single write master even with Amazon Aurora and Microsoft Azure SQL Database Hyperscale.

What's hindering global reads and writes? The fact that they require unique measures for maintaining ACID. If a database is deployed across two or three regions in the world, will the data be divided into regions with the local data intact or will there be duplicate data records from all over the world? Both the methods are right for their own reasons. If the majority of the writes and updates are segregated region-wise, then to boost the performance that data should be sectioned and put in its own region. If the read and write patterns are global, then data should be duplicated to those global regions.

In CockroachDb, developers can write SQL statements mentioning which clusters and regions the database should function in. This will be followed by another SQL command where the developer will specify which regions the database should function in and where the data should be assigned geographically. Then the developer will mention "survivability", which refers to assigning regions and clusters for disaster recovery. Because of these features, developers won't have to learn special configuration statements. It also makes debugging and query optimization easier via EXPLAIN statements generated by its query optimizer.

To relieve developers from the complexities, the new features in CockroachDB 21.1 aims at bringing the barriers down. While this is just a part of it, the much-awaited visual no-code/low code tools will make this process complete.