Cockroachdb: The Definitive Guide: Distributed Data at Scale (Paperback)

Get the lowdown on CockroachDB, the distributed SQL database built to handle the demands of today's data-driven cloud applications. In this hands-on guide, software developers, architects, and DevOps/SRE teams will learn how to use CockroachDB to create applications that scale elastically and provide seamless delivery for end users while remaining indestructible. Teams will also learn how to migrate existing applications to CockroachDB's performant, cloud-native data architecture.

If you're familiar with distributed systems, you'll quickly discover the benefits of strong data correctness and consistency guarantees as well as optimizations for delivering ultra low latencies to globally distributed end users.

You'll learn how to:

- Design and build applications for distributed infrastructure, including data modeling and schema design
- Migrate data into CockroachDB
- Read and write data and run ACID transactions across distributed infrastructure
- Plan a CockroachDB deployment for resiliency across single region and multi-region clusters
- Secure, monitor, and optimize your CockroachDB deployment

Why We Wrote This Book

This book aims to help you, the reader, understand the architecture and capabilities of CockroachDB as well as suitable use cases for CockroachDB. By the end of this book, you will be able to get started with CockroachDB, build effective applications on it, and, ultimately, run a cluster in production.

The chapters teach developers, architects, and DevOps teams how to build, optimize, and manage applications that run on CockroachDB. We wrote this book to give any developer, no matter how they want to work with CockroachDB, the knowledge and tools they need to do it effectively.

Why Cockroach?

The question everyone asks: Why the name CockroachDB?

One immutable fact of engineering is that things break. At large enough scale, things are breaking all the time. The kinds of failures that might happen once a year on a single machine become daily occurrences when you’re running hundreds of shards. A system that aspires to handle large scale must treat fault tolerance as a core responsibility. This was one of the key insights of Google’s MapReduce framework. By requiring all computation to fit within a relatively restrictive framework, it became straightforward for the system to automatically rerun the necessary pieces of work after a failure.We believe that this is how it should be: highly available replication should be the default state of a database from day one, not the result of painstaking configuration work. And looking ahead to day two (or day two hundred), the database must be able to grow along with the application so that runaway success is a cause for celebration, not panic.When we set out to build a relational database from scratch, we wanted to bring consistency, native resilience, data locality, and massive scale to modern cloud applications. Our vision was of a system able to colonize any resource that you gave it onto the public cloud and then relentlessly optimize itself. A database that would use available space and reach equilibrium across a coordinated set of globally distributed nodes so that it would not only incorporate new resources, but—if a machine or data center or even an entire region went down—the database would simply equalize the remaining available resources.We aimed to build a database that would be globally ubiquitous and impossible to eradicate…just like periplaneta brunnea, the pesky common cockroach. And so CockroachDB was born.

Who This Book Is For

Innovative developers: CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide is for developers building modern applications, whether in a small startup or a large enterprise. This guide will teach developers how to build and ship apps with fewer obstacles using a powerful distributed SQL database that just works.

Architects: The Definitive Guide is for modern architects delivering scalable, resilient apps across their IT ecosystem. Architects will learn how to design distributed applications to provide low latency, high availability, and faster performance.

DevOps teams: The Definitive Guide is for strategic IT operators managing applications with data-intensive workloads. Operators will learn how to optimize CockroachDB’s inherent abilities of scale and resilience, efficiently distributing data to meet any workload demand—wherever it’s deployed.

Those already familiar with distributed systems will discover the benefits of strong data correctness and consistency as well as optimizations for delivering low-latency transactions to users anywhere in the world.

It includes specific guidance for anyone transitioning from a monolithic database (e.g., MySQL or PostgreSQL) to a distributed architecture, as well as practical examples for anyone more familiar with NoSQL systems.