CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. Introduction to CockroachDB

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 1st chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

CockroachDB is a distributed, transactional, relational, cloud native SQL database system. That’s quite a mouthful! But in short, CockroachDB leverages both the strengths of the previous generation of relational database systems—strong consistency, the power of SQL, and the relational data model—and the strengths of modern distributed cloud principles. The result is a database system that is broadly compatible with other SQL-based transactional databases but delivers much greater scalability and availability.

In this chapter, we’ll review the history of database management systems (DBMSs) and discover how CockroachDB exploits technology advances of the last few decades to deliver on its ambitious goals.

A Brief History of Databases

Data storage and data processing are the “killer apps” of human civilization. Verbal language gave us an enormous advantage in cooperating as a community. Still, ...