CockroachDB Boosts Automation in Distributed SQL Database
Distributed SQL database provider Cockroach Labs has updated its CockroachDB database with new automation and scalability features.
CockroachDB 22.1 became generally available on May 24 and is the first major database update since the CockroachDB version 21.2 was released in November 2021.
Based in New York, Cockroach Labs raised $633 million in venture capital, including a $160 million round in January 2021. The core idea behind CockroachDB is to enable a distributed, highly resilient database that cannot easily fail or die, much like it is hard to kill a cockroach in the physical world.
The CockroachDB 22.1 update introduces a new admin API that aims to make it easier for developers to programmatically access the database in DevOps and automation tools. The new update also includes more visibility into database operations to improve performance and operational efficiency.
The distributed SQL database market is growing as vendors look to help the organization scale deployments. Some of the key players competing in the market include distributed SQL database provider Yugabytewhich raised $188 million in October 2021. Google recently released its AlloyDB Database as a new entrant in the niche.
AlloyDB, Yugabyte and CockroachDB all have varying degrees of compatibility with the open source PostgreSQL database. One gap that CockroachDB has said it wants to fill is to allow even more compatibility with PostgreSQL.
CockroachDB users are configured to use distributed SQL database updates
Among CockroachDB users is RapidOps digital product development company, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, which uses distributed SQL database to power its Salesmate personalized sales platform.
The company started using MySQL, but that database couldn’t scale to meet Salesmate’s demands as usage grew, said Dipesh Patel, CTO and co-founder of RapidOps.
CockroachDB now serves as the system of record for Salesmate as it meets Salesmate’s needs in a distributed database that includes horizontal scaling capabilities, efficient backup and restore processes, and the ability to link the data to a specific geographic location, Patel said.
One of the main challenges for Patel is enabling automation in the RapidOps environment, which was not as easy as he would have liked in previous versions of CockroachDB.
“As for 22.1 in particular, we are very excited about the new API, as it will allow our engineering teams to programmatically control the provisioning, scaling and monitoring of our clusters,” Patel said.
CockroachDB 22.1 Distributed SQL Database Adds Admission Control
One of the features of the CockroachDB 22.1 update is a feature the vendor calls admission control.
Admission control was previewed in an earlier release, but it wasn’t enabled by default, said Peter Mattis, CTO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs.
Capacity is important because it allows the system to automatically deprioritize certain operations when overloaded. A system can be overloaded for a number of different reasons, including bugs in software that cause resource conflicts or a database operation failure.
Admission control works by providing the ability to delay database operations such as a schema change when the overload condition is triggered, to give a higher priority to maintaining database availability and performance. data as a whole.
The CockroachDB 22.1 distributed SQL database, in addition to enabling admission control by default, provides configurable QoS options for running workloads.
“If you have multiple microservices running on a cluster, you can prioritize traffic from one of those microservices over another,” Mattis said.
Time to Live features bring a new data management option
One of the more esoteric, yet significant, features of CockroachDB 22.1 is a feature known as Time to Live (TTL), which specifies how long a given row or data entry should exist in the database. data before being deleted.
“It’s very common that you have a table you want to insert into and the data is only useful for a certain amount of time,” Mattis explained. “Maybe the data is only useful for a week, then a report is run and the data is no longer useful.”
Prior to the CockroachDB 22.1 Distributed SQL Database update, users had to manually delete old data or write a custom script to delete data that was no longer useful. With TTL, users can now have old data automatically deleted.
But deleting data with TTL also uses resiliency capabilities in the database, just in case the deleted data is needed at a later time, with a feature called multi-version concurrency control, Mattis noted.
“So when you delete a piece of data, it still exists for a while,” he said.
Closing the PostgreSQL compatibility gap in the future
One of the main goals of Cockroach Labs is to create as much compatibility as possible with the open source PostgreSQL database.
A missing piece is support for user-defined functions, which allow users to perform a custom operation on data from an SQL query, such as a data transformation.
“We are working towards full compatibility with Postgres and are gradually approaching it,” Mattis said.