Modern businesses serve customers around the globe, but few manage to avoid sending far-flung customer requests across an ocean (or two!) to application servers colocated with a centralized database. This presents two significant problems: high latencies and conflicts with evolving data sovereignty regulations. CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database that solves the problem of global scale using a combination of features including geo-replication, geo-partitioning, and data interleaving, which together allow a customer’s data to stay in proximity while still enjoying strong, single-copy consistency.
In his talk, Peter Mattis, VP of Engineering at Cockroach Labs, briefly introduces CockroachDB and then explores how it is able to achieve low latency and precise data domiciling in an example global use case.