CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database

TLDR

Organizations increasingly operate globally and are replacing legacy DBMSs with cloud‑based systems that can scale OLTP workloads to millions of users. This paper presents CockroachDB’s design and a novel transaction model that enables consistent geo‑distributed transactions on commodity hardware. CockroachDB achieves fault tolerance and high performance by replicating and distributing data, while its distributed SQL layer automatically scales with cluster size and provides a standard SQL interface. Performance evaluations and case studies demonstrate CockroachDB’s scalability, and the authors share lessons learned from five years of development.

Abstract

We live in an increasingly interconnected world, with many organizations operating across countries or even continents. To serve their global user base, organizations are replacing their legacy DBMSs with cloud-based systems capable of scaling OLTP workloads to millions of users. CockroachDB is a scalable SQL DBMS that was built from the ground up to support these global OLTP workloads while maintaining high availability and strong consistency. Just like its namesake, CockroachDB is resilient to disasters through replication and automatic recovery mechanisms. This paper presents the design of CockroachDB and its novel transaction model that supports consistent geo-distributed transactions on commodity hardware. We describe how CockroachDB replicates and distributes data to achieve fault tolerance and high performance, as well as how its distributed SQL layer automatically scales with the size of the database cluster while providing the standard SQL interface that users expect. Finally, we present a comprehensive performance evaluation and share a couple of case studies of CockroachDB users. We conclude by describing lessons learned while building CockroachDB over the last five years.