Cockroachdb

About Cockroachdb

CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built for global scale and resilience, founded in 2015 by Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell (former Google engineers who worked on Bigtable and Colossus). CockroachDB combines the familiarity of PostgreSQL (wire-compatible, supports most Postgres SQL syntax) with the distributed architecture of Google Spanner — automatically sharding data across nodes, replicating across availability zones or regions, and providing serializable ACID transactions across the distributed cluster. CockroachDB's multi-region support enables active-active deployments where reads and writes serve users from the nearest region simultaneously — a capability that requires manual sharding or middleware in traditional databases. CockroachDB Serverless automatically scales compute and storage independently, charging by request units (RUs) consumed — zero cost at idle, unlimited scale on demand. CockroachDB's survivability model: it survives the loss of up to 2 out of 5 nodes in a cluster while continuing to serve consistent reads and writes, using Raft consensus for replication. CockroachDB's PostgreSQL compatibility covers 95%+ of common Postgres features — most applications using Postgres drivers (psycopg2, pgx, ActiveRecord, Prisma) connect without code changes. CockroachDB Dedicated provides dedicated clusters on AWS, GCP, and Azure with private networking. CockroachDB is used at DoorDash, Comcast, Bose, and Faire for high-traffic, globally distributed OLTP workloads. Its main limitations are higher latency than single-node Postgres for simple queries (distributed coordination overhead) and higher cost for applications not requiring multi-region distribution.