CockroachDB review: A scale-out SQL database built for survival
Until very recently, when you shopped for a database you had to choose: Scalability or consistency? SQL databases such as MySQL guarantee strong consistency, but don’t scale well horizontally. (Manual sharding for scalability is no one’s idea of fun.) NoSQL databases such as MongoDB scale beautifully, but offer only eventual consistency. (“Wait long enough, and you can read the right answer”—which isn’t any way to do financial transactions.)
Google Cloud Spanner, a fully managed relational database service running on Google Compute Engine (GCE) released in February 2017, has the scalability of NoSQL databases while retaining SQL compatibility, relational schemas, ACID transactions, and strong external consistency. Spanner is a sharded, globally distributed and replicated relational database that uses a Paxos algorithm for reaching a consensus among its nodes.
One alternative to Spanner, and the subject of this review, is CockroachDB, an open source, horizontally scalable distributed SQL database developed by ex-Googlers who were familiar with Spanner. CockroachDB borrows from Google’s Spanner for the design of its data storage system, and it uses a Raft algorithm for reaching a consensus among its nodes.
Like Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built on top of a transactional and consistent key-value store, in CockroachDB’s case on RocksDB. CockroachDB’s primary design goals are support for ACID transactions, horizontal scalability, and (most of all) survivability, hence the name.
Source: InfoWorld – Cloud Computing
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