Architecture

CockroachDB: Architecture of a Geo-Distributed SQL Database

Could you tell me what the focus of your work today is?

I am VP of Engineering and CTO of Cockroach Labs. I am keeping the lights on for the engineering department at Cockroach Labs and making sure product development stays on track for CockroachDB. I've been involved in every aspect of CockroachDB and today engineering work is much more limited, focusing on specifics like the performance of our low level key-value storage, but that probably gets about 20% of my time, 80% is training the rest of the teams to functioning and working smoothly.

What's the motivation for your talk?

To give an architectural overview of the components that go into building this distributed SQL database. I want to talk about this from the base level, how we're doing replication, how our data is spread across the cluster and then step it up through the levels, how we do distributed transactions, some of the optimizations involved there, stepping up past the distributed transactional store up in the SQL, how the SQL execution works, how we map SQL data down onto key-value data and then that we have a cost-based SQL optimizer, how the SQL optimizer plays into a distributed SQL database.