CockroachDB - an overview

Here is another video that I recorded at DevWeek2022 (check out the whole playlist here).  Today's interview is with Jim Hatcher of Cockroach Labs.  Jim talks about their multi-node CockroachDB which is targeted at developers and architects and can be self-hosted or consumed as a SaaS offering.  BTW if you want to try out the serverless offering Jim mentions, head to cockroachlabs.com and take it for a spin.

Transcript

CockroachDB Jim Hatcher

Barton: Right coming to you live from dev week cloud here. I'm here with Jim Hatcher. Jim, how are you doing?

Jim Hatcher Doing great.

Barton So you were here with Cockroach DB. What the heck is Cockroach DB?

[00:00:09] Jim Hatcher: That that's a great question. You we're a distributed SQL platform. Which is kind of the best of both worlds between the traditional relational database, like Oracle and a no SQL database like Cassandra.  you know, apps interact with us like a SQL database. We do joins and foreign keys and all those things you expect your SQL database to do, but under the covers, we're a key value store.  So that makes it really easy to partition data, replicate data, move data around on the cluster.

[00:00:42] And so Cockroach cluster is made up of many nodes and has that kind of scale out ability of a Cassandra or, or Mongo, but also has the things we love about relational database, you know, the consistency and asset transactions that we love about working with, with relational DBs.

[00:00:59] Barton: So who would be the type of people or what are the use cases for something like Cockroach?

[00:01:05] Jim Hatcher: Yeah, it's a great product for developers and architects. I think as a developer, it's great because, you know, you can let the database handle concurrency issues, isolation, consistency issues, you know, you don't have to deal with that in your code.

[00:01:23] Barton: So, but as far as industry, would these be banks? Would they be retail? Would they be …

[00:01:25] Jim Hatcher:. Yeah. I mean, I think the key thing is we're a good for system of record workload. So if you're a bank and you're keeping up with bank balances or you're retail, and you're keeping up with inventory or an IM you know, access management system where you're tracking people's passwords and what systems they have access to, anything where you need to have a strong, consistent view of the data across your data.

[00:01:49] And eventual consistency is not an option you need a strong, available, highly resilient database to have the right piece of information. Those, those are the things we're good at.  

[00:01:59] Barton: [00:02:00] So as far as origin story, where did this come from? was it somebody's PhD thesis? Was it somebody who had a problem at another company that wasn't solved? And is this open source?

[00:02:12] Jim Hatcher: Yeah so we have three founders, they're all ex Google engineers that were early Google engineers and worked on Gmail and a lot of the Google products that we use today. And I think they were inspired by Google cloud spanner, which is this relational distributed Database. And so they, they had the idea to build a similar product. So seven and a half years ago, they started Cockroach and did like three years of R and D you know, just working on the engineering of it.

the name Cockroach, the idea is because it's a distributed database, it runs on many nodes.  So, you know, you can kill one of the nodes. One of those nodes might die But you can't kill the colony, you know.  So it's a database that you can't kill. It's a really highly, highly available and strongly consistent database, which is, you know, that's kind of our message.

[00:03:08] Barton: So if you come into the data center, you flip on the light, they all go all over the place.

Jim Hatcher: Yeah. Right.

Barton Okay. And then speaking of data centers, would this run on a private cloud? A public cloud?

[00:03:19] Jim Hatcher: We do have a SaaS offering, called CockroachBD Dedicated that you can spin up on AWS or GCP but we also have a self-hosted option which you can run on-prem or you can run on resources like EC2 two and in the cloud, or you can run a hybrid. Say I've got a Cockroach cluster and it's got nodes that are on prem and you could have a piece in a private cloud and a piece in public cloud. And as long as those nodes can talk to each other that's one connected Cockroach cluster. So it's really very flexible. You can do a lot of neat things with it.

[00:03:56] Barton: Cool. And so just to end with, if you wanted to kick the tires on this, check it out, get your feet wet. What would you advise folks to do?

[00:04:03] Jim Hatcher: Yeah, well, recently we released a serverless offering and there's a free tier in serverless so you can go to Cockroach labs.com and sign up for the serverless offering. You can have a free account on serverless storage of up to five gigs of data for free and it's click, click, click to the website. You have something spun up in minutes and you can start playing with it. So it's a, it's  good way to get started.

[00:04:37] Barton: Awesome. Jim Hatcher, thank you so much.

Jim Hatcher: Yeah. Thanks.