Fearless global transactions with CockroachDB

Modern-day applications are rapidly moving towards globally distributed architectures to ensure always-on availability and low-latency access for their users. This has placed an increasing strain on the data storage systems that underpin these global applications. To keep up, many of today’s storage systems sacrifice data integrity and severely restrict data model expressivity. This shifts the burden of working around these subtle limitations to application developers, which has proven to be difficult and error-prone.

In this talk, we will discuss CockroachDB, a scalable, globally distributed NewSQL database that aims to better serve this next generation of applications. First, the talk will explore the shared-nothing architecture of CockroachDB, which was originally inspired by the design of Google's Spanner. Next, the talk will introduce CockroachDB’s new multi-region facilities, which were introduced in its latest release. These powerful abstractions strive to make global deployments fast, simple to understand, and safe to use for even the most important data. Lastly, the talk will close with a discussion of specific performance optimizations CockroachDB has made to speed up global transactions, including a new atomic commit protocol and an extension to its transaction model for operating over global, read-mostly data.