CockroachDB 22.1: Build your way from prototype to super-scale

Today we released CockroachDB 22.1, which helps you build better with less effort, at every stage of your application lifecycle.

Choosing the right database can be a difficult balance of planning for now versus the future. Often you need to make tradeoffs—you might start quickly on Postgres or a similar cloud service, but down the road your database hits bottlenecks as your audience scales. Or you might invest time upfront learning an unnecessarily complex platform that promises future success.

We built CockroachDB so you don’t need to make those tradeoffs. You can use the same database from start to scale, without rebuilding your app and without crippling, complex operations. You can start small and quickly, with the confidence your application can reach massive scale and handle millions of transactions per second over time.

In our latest release, we’ve delivered updates for every stage of your journey—from your first query to your first million customers and beyond.

• Start faster and begin prototyping

  • Get started quickly and manage your cluster directly from the command line, with the new CLI for CockroachDB Dedicated and CockroachDB Serverless
  • Develop Node.js and Typescript apps easily with support for Prisma
  • Prototype for free and flexibly with various updates in CockroachDB Serverless, including easier connection to your app, more cloud regions, and more extensive monitoring
  • Build more efficiently with time-to-live (TTL), which enables time-based deletes of row-level data
  • Integrate CockroachDB with Google Pub/Sub and build better event-driven applications with updates to Change Data Capture (CDC) 

• Optimize more efficiently and avoid toil

  • Automate and programmatically control the provisioning, scaling, and management of your clusters with the new API for CockroachDB Dedicated and CockroachDB Serverless
  • Troubleshoot and optimize query performance more easily with index recommendations, contention insights, and hash-sharded indexes
  • Monitor CockroachDB Dedicated within a single pane of glass with support for Datadog
  • Improve backup efficiency and costs with a variety of updates

• Scale better to meet peak demand, everywhere

  • Address data domiciling concerns by keeping data in specific geographic regions with Super Regions
  • Improve performance while serving millions of transactions per second with Quality of Service (Qos), Admission Control, and hotspot observability

Read on to learn more, or head over to the Release Notes for a full list of what’s new.

Start faster and begin prototyping

When you’re getting started, prototyping, and building, you don’t want to spend time configuring and planning the backend. With updates in this release, you can stand up CockroachDB and integrate it with your stack quicker than ever.

• Get started more quickly and streamline your workflow by managing your cluster straight from the command line, with the new ccloud CLI for CockroachDB Dedicated and Serverless. The CLI lets you spin up, configure, and scale your clusters with a few lines of code.

• Develop Node.js and Typescript apps more easily with support for Prisma Client and Prisma Migrate.

• Prototype for free and flexibly with various updates to CockroachDB Serverless, including easier connection to your app, more cloud regions to deploy in, and more extensive monitoring.

• Build more efficiently with time-to-live (TTL), which lets you set a lifespan for row-level data, after which it will be deleted. TTL is a top-requested feature with a variety of common use cases (now in preview).

• Integrate CockroachDB with more data streaming tools and build better event-driven applications with: 

  • Support for Google Pub/Sub, the popular streaming analytics middleware tool. This integration also unlocks an entire suite of Google Cloud tools to use in conjunction, including BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, and more.
  • Improved observability and flexibility for Change Data Capture (CDC) including more performance metrics, the ability to run CDC on more types of schema, and a new statement that lets you alter existing changefeeds.

Read how Ultimate Tournament rapidly built their eSports betting platform→ 

Optimize more efficiently and avoid toil

Monitoring and operating your database is often repetitive and time-consuming. We built CockroachDB to be as operationally low-touch as possible and eliminate common database pains like downtime for maintenance, frequent patches, or black boxes around performance.

In this release, we’ve introduced updates for more automation, easier troubleshooting and optimization, and better backup management.

• Automate management of CockroachDB with the new Cloud API. The API lets you programmatically control the provisioning, scaling, and management of your CockroachDB Dedicated and Serverless clusters, to create more efficient development and delivery pipelines (now in preview).

• Troubleshoot and optimize query performance more quickly and easily with the following updates:

  • Understand which indexes to add or remove with new index recommendations and metrics. Using the EXPLAIN command, you can view which index you should create to optimize and tune a particular statement, and using the DB Console, you can now see index usage metrics to identify unused indexes that may be impeding write performance.
  • Find and fix transaction contention with new workload insights that explain why contention is happening in real-time for affected active statements, and historically for past statements.
  • Reduce hotspots for write-heavy workloads with hash-sharded indexes, which let you improve performance when using sequential primary keys, such as timestamps (now Generally Available).

• Monitor CockroachDB within a single pane of glass with support for Datadog. The new integration lets you monitor CockroachDB, set up alerts, and correlate CockroachDB performance metrics alongside application performance metrics.

  

• Improve backup efficiency and costs with updates that let you specify different locations for full and incremental backups, enable intelligent tiering of backups, and exclude some table data from backups.

Read how RapidOps streamlined ops by migrating off MySQL→

Scale better to meet peak demand, everywhere

Whether your application serves millions of customers or you’re expanding to new markets, scale is both exciting and terrifying. Downtime is not an option, and you must ensure peak performance all the time.

In CockroachDB 22.1, we’ve added even more capabilities to ease the stress of scale, and let your apps maintain performance across geographies and while handling millions of transactions per second.

• Address data domiciling concerns by keeping data in specific geographic regions with a new capability, Super Regions. Super Regions let you group multiple cloud regions into a larger geographic area and ensure data never leaves that area, even during a region failure. This capability significantly reduces the overhead for teams that must cope with data regulations while operating multi-region or multinational applications (now in preview).

• Improve performance during periods of heavy transactions with the following updates:

  • Prioritize request execution with Quality of Service (QoS), which ensures the most important requests for your application are always served first. Choose from three levels of prioritization, available as session settings.

  • Improve query execution and reliability with Admission Control, which limits the rate of query execution during surges in demand by creating a queue of incoming requests (now Generally Available).

  • Detect and address hotspots with the new Hot Ranges page in the monitoring UI, which shows real-time stats on which ranges (shards) have the highest QPS and transactions. This information helps you track down and alleviate bottlenecks.

    

Read how Kami scaled 20x to serve remote students during the pandemic→

Learn more, win a T-shirt, and get started for free

This post covers just a sampling of the updates in CockroachDB 22.1. For a full list, head over to the Release Notes. If you have thoughts, or if you just want to say hi, our community slack is the place for you.

We’re hosting three live sessions so you can learn more. Two of them include opportunities to win a limited-edition t-shirt, so don’t miss out!

• Coding Livestream: Building with the new cloud CLI - May 31

  Join us as we demo and play with the new cloud CLI, which lets you spin up and manage CockroachDB Dedicated and Serverless with code.

• Office Hours: Q&A on CockroachDB 22.1 - June 8

  Join us for a live Q&A session, where we’ll briefly cover what’s new, then turn it over to audience Q&A. The people with the 3 best questions will win a limited-edition t-shirt!

• Scale Happens: How to Prepare for and Operate at Scale - July 6

  Scale can be a challenge, and it often creates operational complexity. Join us for a discussion about their challenges of scale and how CockroachDB can help you. The first 50 people who sign up for this event (and attend) will win a limited-edition t-shirt!

To try out CockroachDB yourself, you can get started for free on CockroachDB Dedicated. You can also try out many of these features for free on our newest offering, CockroachDB Serverless.