CockroachDB, an open source, fault-tolerant SQL database with horizontal scaling and strong consistency across nodes—and a name few people will likely forget—is now officially available.
Cockroach Labs, the company behind its development, touts CockroachDB as a “cloud native” database solution—a system engineered to run as a distributed resource. Version 1.0 is available in both basic and for-pay editions, and both boast features that will appeal to enterprises.
Many of CockroachDB’s feature were inspired by the work underpinning Google Cloud Spanner, but CockroachDB is open source. It supports much of the functionality found in traditional SQL databases like MariaDB or PostgreSQL, such as SQL dialect support and ACID transactions.
Cockroach Labs’ biggest claim is that CockroachDB can offer those features, plus scaling and resilience features similar to what’s found in NoSQL databases. A CockroachDB deployment with multiple nodes can serve not only reads but also writes, as long as at least three nodes are running somewhere.
