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CockroachDB EC-1 Part 2: Technical design

CockroachDB was intended to be a global database from the beginning. The founders of Cockroach Labs wanted to ensure that data written in one location would be viewable immediately in another location 10,000 miles away. The use case was simple, but the work needed to make it happen was herculean.

The company is betting the farm that it can solve one of the largest challenges for web-scale applications. The approach its taking is clever, but its a bit complicated, particularly for the non-technical reader. Given its history and engineering talent, the company is in the process of pulling it off and making a big impact on the database market, making it a technology well worth understanding. In short, theres value in digging into the details.

In part 1 of this EC-1, I provided a general overview and a look at the origins of Cockroach Labs. In this installment, Im going to cover the technical details of the technology with an eye to the non-technical reader. Im going to describe the CockroachDB technology through three questions:

Spencer Kimball, CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, describes the situation this way:

Theres lots of other stuff you need to consider when building global applications, particularly around data management. Take, for example, the question and answer website Quora. Lets say you live in Australia. You have an account and you store the particulars of your Quora user identity on a database partition in Australia.

But when you post a question, you actually dont want that data to just be posted in Australia. You want that data to be posted everywhere so that all the answers to all the questions are the same for everybody, anywhere. You dont want to have a situation where you answer a question in Sydney and then you can see it in Hong Kong, but you cant see it in the EU. When thats the case, you end up getting different answers depending where you are. Thats a huge problem.

Reading and writing data over a global geography is challenging for pretty much the same reason that its faster to get a pizza delivered from across the street than from across the city. The essential constraints of time and space apply. Whether its digital data or a pepperoni pizza, the further away you are from the source, the longer stuff takes to get to you.

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How engineers fought the CAP theorem in the global war on latency - TechCrunch