CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 7. Application Migration and Integration

As a thoroughly modern database system, CockroachDB is a perfect choice for new application development. However, it’s also a good choice for the modernization of existing applications. Many applications built on the last generation of relational database systems are now facing limitations that can sensibly be addressed only by a migration to a distributed architecture. In many cases, a distributed SQL-based system such as CockroachDB is the most attractive migration target because it does not—unlike distributed NoSQL systems—require a complete rework of the application’s data model or code base. In this chapter, we’ll explain how to move data from existing databases into CockroachDB.

Moving data into CockroachDB is just one part of the story. While CockroachDB is a general-purpose database system, its sweet spot is undoubtedly operational transactional processing. In many environments, the data that is processed within CockroachDB will be leveraged for business intelligence or data science purposes in combination with data from other operational systems. In these cases, we will want a mechanism for moving data into external systems. The CockroachDB change data capture (CDC) facility is invaluable for this purpose—we’ll see how CDC can be used to move data into external systems such as Snowflake DB or Kafka. We’ll also see how data can be dumped from CockroachDB directly to external files.

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The first step in using CockroachDB ...