Getting Started with CockroachDB

A guide to using a modern, cloud-native, and distributed SQL database for your data-intensive apps

Kishen Das Kondabagilu Rajanna

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781800560659
• eBook ISBN: 9781800567757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Mining
• Index: Computer Science

Get hands-on with deploying and managing your database services to provide scalable and high-speed data access on CockroachDB

Key Features

• Gain insights into CockroachDB and build highly reliable cloud-native applications
• Explore the power of a scalable and highly available cloud-native SQL database to distribute data and workloads automatically
• Build high-speed database services using CockroachDB and troubleshoot performance issues

Book Description

Getting Started with CockroachDB will introduce you to the inner workings of CockroachDB and help you to understand how it provides faster access to distributed data through a SQL interface. The book will also uncover how you can use the database to provide solutions where the data is highly available.

Starting with CockroachDB's installation, setup, and configuration, this SQL book will familiarize you with the database architecture and database design principles. You'll then discover several options that CockroachDB provides to store multiple copies of your data to ensure fast data access. The book covers the internals of CockroachDB, how to deploy and manage it on the cloud, performance tuning to get the best out of CockroachDB, and how to scale data across continents and serve it locally. In addition to this, you'll get to grips with fault tolerance and auto-rebalancing, how indexes work, and the CockroachDB Admin UI. The book will guide you in building scalable cloud services on top of CockroachDB, covering administrative and security aspects and tips for troubleshooting, performance enhancements, and a brief guideline on migrating from traditional databases.

By the end of this book, you'll have gained sufficient knowledge to manage your data on CockroachDB and interact with it from your application layer.

What you will learn

• Become well-versed with the overall architecture and design concepts of CockroachDB
• Understand how auto-rebalancing of data can avoid performance bottlenecks
• Get to know how CockroachDB achieves atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability
• Partition your data across multiple geolocations to ensure very low latency when serving data
• Find out how indexes are stored and the optimizations used to serve query results faster
• Discover the key concepts of deploying and managing CockroachDB clusters

Who this book is for

Software engineers, database developers, database administrators, and anyone who wishes to learn about the features of CockroachDB and how to build database solutions that are fast, highly available, and cater to business-critical applications, will find this book useful. Although no prior exposure to CockroachDB is required, familiarity with database concepts will help you to get the most out of this book.

Section 1: Getting to Know CockroachDB

In this section, we will provide a brief introduction to CockroachDB and the motivation behind creating this new database, as well as go into its overall architecture and design concepts.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, CockroachDB - A Brief Introduction
• Chapter 2, How Does CockroachDB Work Internally?

Chapter 1: CockroachDB – A Brief Introduction

In this chapter, we will go over the history of databases, where we will learn about the evolution of SQL, NoSQL, and NewSQL databases, various relational models, different categories for classifying databases, and timelines. Later, we will discuss the CAP theorem. Finally, we will briefly discuss the motivation for creating a new database and learn about the basic architecture of CockroachDB.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• The history and evolution of databases
• Database concepts
• CAP theorem
• CockroachDB

The history and evolution of databases

A database is a collection of data that can be organized, managed, modified, and retrieved using a computer. The system that helps with managing data in a database is called a database management system (DBMS).

In the 1950s and 1960s, several advancements were made in terms of processors, storage, memory, and networks. We also had our first programming languages, COBOL and FORTRAN. The development of hard disk drives for data storage further spurred the development of databases. Around the same time, the first notion of a modern-day computer with a mouse and graphical user interface came into existence, making it easy for the general public to consume it. In this section, we will discuss how various types of databases evolved.

SQL

The first database was designed by Charles William Bachman III, an American computer scientist. In 1963, he developed the Integrated Data Store (IDS), which gave rise to the concept of the navigational database. In navigational databases, we can find records by chasing references from other objects. For example, let's say that in a school database, you want to find all the students from a specific grade in a specific school. In a navigational database, first, you have to go to the group of students that belong to a particular school and then to the group that belongs to a particular grade. So, records can be accessed by hierarchical navigation. Based on IDS, Bachman later developed the CODASYL database model in 1969. CODASYL stands for Conference/Committee on Data Systems Languages, which was a consortium to guide the development of programming languages. Around the same time Edgar F. Codd, an IBM employee, developed the IBM Information Management System (IMS), which was based on the hierarchical database model. A hierarchical database model is a data model in which the data is designed in a tree-like structure. In 1970, Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce developed Structured Query Language (SQL) based on what they'd learned about IMS. They initially called it Structured English Query Language (SEQUEL), which System R was later developed with by a group at the IBM San Jose research laboratory. In 1976, QUEL, which is a relational database query language designed by Michael Ralph Stonebraker, was developed as part of the Interactive Graphics Retrieval System (INGRES) database management system at the University of California, Berkeley.

Based on QUEL and SQL, several databases were implemented. Some of the most prominent ones include Post Ingres (Postgres), Sybase, Microsoft SQL, IBM DB2, Oracle, MariaDB, and MySQL.

Object-oriented databases

In the 1980s, object-oriented database systems (OODBMSes) grew in popularity. In OODBMSes, information is represented as objects compared to tables in relational databases. Some of the important ones include Gemstone/S, Objectivity/DB, InterSystems Cache, Perst, ZODB, Wakanda, ObjectDB, ODABA, and Realm.

NoSQL

The concept of non-SQL or non-relational databases has existed since the 1960s, but the term NoSQL became has much more popular in the last decade. NoSQL databases focus on performance and scaling and mostly rely on a non-relational data model such as a document, key-value, wide-column, or graph to organize the data. Some of the most popular ones in this category include Cassandra, MongoDB, Couchbase, Dynamo, FoundationDB, Neo4j, and Hbase.

NewSQL

With the introduction of the on-demand availability of compute, storage, and network resources and the pay-as-you-go model, which is collectively known as cloud computing, the amount of data that we collect, process, manage, and analyze has been growing exponentially. Although it was relatively easier for some of the NoSQL databases to adapt to the cloud, it is still much harder for traditional SQL databases to do so. Many of them are better suited for vertical scaling and do not consider geographically distributed data, the shared-nothing architecture, and enormous scale as part of thei...

Table of contents

• Getting Started with CockroachDB
• Contributors
• Preface
• Section 1: Getting to Know CockroachDB
• Chapter 1: CockroachDB – A Brief Introduction
• Chapter 2: How Does CockroachDB Work Internally?
• Section 2: Exploring the Important Features of CockroachDB
• Chapter 3: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID)
• Chapter 4: Geo-Partitioning
• Chapter 5: Fault Tolerance and Auto-Rebalancing
• Chapter 6: How Indexes Work in CockroachDB
• Section 3: Working with CockroachDB
• Chapter 7: Schema Creation and Management
• Chapter 8: Exploring the Admin User Interface
• Chapter 9: An Overview Of Security Aspects
• Chapter 10: Troubleshooting Issues
• Chapter 11: Performance Benchmarking and Migration
• Appendix: Bibliography and Additional Resources
• Other Books You May Enjoy