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cockroachdb
cockroach
Go2014–2026
cockroachdb / cockroach

cockroach

CockroachDB — the cloud native, distributed SQL database designed for high availability, effortless scale, and control over data placement.

Data & DatabasesSystems & InfrastructureDevOps & Cloud
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
114Distinct people
170Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
32.6KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

CockroachDB — the cloud native, distributed SQL database designed for high availability, effortless scale, and control over data placement.

GitHub

Where it is used

  • DoorDash — DoorDash runs CockroachDB as a fully abstracted internal database service for its engineering organization. DoorDash leverages it to meet availability goals at massive scale. Source
  • City Storage Systems — City Storage Systems uses CockroachDB to run Tier 0 applications, migrating their order management system and user authentication platform to it. They replaced some PostgreSQL use cases with CockroachDB for these critical apps. Source
  • 1 more documented example

What people are saying

Tried it before. Compatibility depends on how complicated your SQL is. There's a detailed list of supported syntax which is getting better every release but it's best for…

manigandham used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year170 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-05-26 11:44:43 UTC to 2026-08-11 19:04:13 UTC.

010203040502014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 6 submissions, 3 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 17 mentions; 2 submissions, 15 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 20 mentions; 0 submissions, 20 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 46 mentions; 1 submissions, 45 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 18 mentions; 1 submissions, 17 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 0 submissions, 16 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 1 submissions, 13 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC963
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC17215
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC20020
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC46145
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC18117
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16016
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14113
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
CockroachDB is a cloud-native distributed SQL database designed to build, scale, and manage modern, data-intensive applications. What is CockroachDB? Docs Starting with Cockroach Cloud Starting with CockroachDB Client Drivers Deployment Need Help? Contributing Design Comparison with Other Databases See Also What is CockroachDB? CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built on a transactional and strongly-consistent key-value store. It scales horizontally; survives disk, machine, rack, and even datacenter failures with minimal latency disruption and no manual intervention; supports strongly-consistent ACID transactions; and provides a familiar SQL API for structuring, manipulating, and querying data. For more details, see our product overview, FAQ or architecture document. Docs For guidance on installation, development, deployment, and administration, see our User Documentation. Starting with CockroachCloud We can run CockroachDB for you, so you don't have to run your own cluster. See our online documentation: Quickstart with CockroachCloud Starting with CockroachDB Install CockroachDB: using a pre-built executable or build it from source. Start a local cluster and connect to it via the built-in SQL client. Learn more about CockroachDB SQL. Use a PostgreSQL-compatible driver or ORM to build an app with CockroachDB. Explore core features, such as data replication, automatic rebalancing, and fault tolerance and recovery. Client Drivers CockroachDB supports the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so you can use any available PostgreSQL client drivers to connect from various languages. For recommended drivers that we've tested, see Install Client Drivers. For tutorials using these drivers, as well as supported ORMs, see Example Apps. Deployment CockroachCloud - Steps to create a free CockroachCloud cluster on your preferred Cloud platform. Manual - Steps to deploy a CockroachDB cluster manually on multiple machines. Cloud - Guides for deploying CockroachDB on various cloud platforms. Orchestration - Guides for running CockroachDB with popular open-source orchestration systems. Need Help? CockroachDB Community Slack - Join our slack to connect with our engineers and other users running CockroachDB. CockroachDB Forum and Stack Overflow - Ask questions, find answers, and help other users. Troubleshooting documentation - Learn how to troubleshoot common errors, cluster setup, and SQL query behavior. For filing bugs, suggesting improvements, or requesting new features, help us out by opening an issue. Building from source See our wiki for more details. Contributing We welcome your contributions! If you're looking for issues to work on, try looking at the good first issue list. We do our best to tag issues suitable for new external contributors with that label, so it's a great way to find something you can help with! See our wiki for more details. Engineering discussions take place on our public mailing list, cockroach-db@googlegroups.com. Also please join our Community Slack (there's a dedicated #contributors channel!) to ask questions, discuss your ideas, and connect with other contributors. Design For an in-depth discussion of the CockroachDB architecture, see our Architecture Guide. For the original design motivation, see our design doc. Licensing All versions released on or after November 18, 2024 (specifically, major version series v24.3 and later, and patch fixes for v23.1.29+, v23.2.16+, v24.1.7+, and v24.2.5+) are published under the CockroachDB Software License (CSL). Source code in a given file is licensed under the CSL and the copyright belongs to The Cockroach Authors unless otherwise noted in the file or in a LICENSE or README file located in the same or a parent directory of the file. Comparison with Other Databases To see how key features of CockroachDB stack up against other databases, check out CockroachDB in Comparison. See Also Tech Talks (by CockroachDB founders, engineers, and customers!) CockroachDB User Documentation The CockroachDB Blog Key design documents Serializable, Lockless, Distributed: Isolation in CockroachDB Consensus, Made Thrive Trust, But Verify: How CockroachDB Checks Replication Living Without Atomic Clocks The CockroachDB Architecture Document
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

170 sources
Thaxll·Aug 11, 2026
The "world" runs on Kubernetes which is using Raft: https://pkg.go.dev/go.etcd.io/etcd/raft/v3 Are you saying that this implementation is wrong? "This Raft library is stable and feature complete. As of 2016, it is the most widely used Raft library in production, serving tens of thousands clusters each day. It powers distributed systems such as etcd, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Cloud Foundry Diego, CockroachDB, TiDB, Project Calico, Flannel, Hyperledger and more." One of the most popular distributed DB is Cockroach which is written in go and also uses Raft: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/tree/master/pkg/raf...
In Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
vvern·Jun 14, 2025
Some time ago I worked on cockroachdb and I was working on implementing planning for complex online schema changes. We really wanted a model that could convincingly handle and reasonably schedule arbitrary combinations of schema change statements that are valid in Postgres. Unlike mysql postgres offers transactional schema changes. Unlike Postgres, cockroach strives to implement online schema changes in a protocol inspired by f1 [0]. Also, you want to make sure you can safely roll back (until you’ve reached the point where you know it can’t fail, then only metadata updates are allowed). The model we came up with was to decompose all things that can possibly change into “elements” [1] and each element had a schedule of state transitions that move the element through a sequence of states from public to absent or vice versa [2]. Each state t
Read the rest
ransitions has operations [3]. Anyway, you end up wanting to define rules that say that certain element states have to be entered before other if the elements are related in some way. Or perhaps some transitions should happen at the same time. To express these rules I created a little datalog-like framework I called rel [4]. This lets you embed in go a rules engine that then you can add indexes to so that you can have sufficiently efficient implementation and know that all your lookups are indexed statically. You write the rules in Go [5]. To be honest it could be more ergonomic. The rules are written in Go but for testing and visibility they produce a datomic-inspired format [6]. There’s a lot of rules now! The internal implementation isn’t too far off from the search implementation presented here [7]. Here’s unify [8]. The thing has some indexes and index selection for acceleration. It also has inverted indexes for set containment queries. It was fun to make a little embedded logic language and to have had a reason to! 0: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... 1: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 2: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 3: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 4: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 5: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 6: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/pkg/sql... 7: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 8: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa...
In Implementing Logic Programming
karmakaze·Aug 15, 2024
I searched github and thought this[0] was it. > Source code in this repository is variously licensed under the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL), the CockroachDB Community License (CCL), the MIT license, BSD-style licenses, and other licenses specified in the source code. Source code in a given file is licensed under the BSL and the copyright belongs to The Cockroach Authors unless otherwise noted at the beginning of the file. Is the caveat in this part (that I didn't catch before)? "Source code in a given file is licensed under the BSL and ..." That is sucky. [0] https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach?tab=License-1-ov-fi...
In CockroachDB license change
stsffap·Jun 12, 2024
Restate is built as a sharded replicated state machine similar to how TiKV (https://tikv.org/), Kudu (https://kudu.apache.org/kudu.pdf) or CockroachDB (https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach) are designed. Instead of relying on a specific consensus implementation, we have decided to encapsulate this part into a virtual log (inspired by Delos https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi20-balakrishnan.pdf) since it makes it possible to tune the system more easily for different deployment scenarios (on-prem, cloud, cost-effective blob storage). Moreover, it allows for some other cool things like seamlessly moving from one log implementation to another. Apart from that the whole system design has been influenced by ideas from stream processing systems such as Apache Flink (https://flink.apache.org/), log storage systems such as LogDevice (http
Read the rest
s://logdevice.io/) and others. We plan to publish a more detailed follow-up blog post where we explain why we developed a new stateful system, how we implemented it, and what the benefits are. Stay tuned!
In Show HN: Restate – Low-latency durable workflows for JavaScript/Java, in Rust
michae2·Apr 6, 2024
Author here. We've spent the past year adding read committed isolation to CockroachDB. There were many interesting design decisions, such as: - whether to use multiple snapshots or a single snapshot per statement - how to handle read uncertainty intervals - how to incorporate SELECT FOR UPDATE locking into Raft - how to handle SELECT FOR UPDATE subqueries - how to prevent lost update anomalies between two UPDATEs Some of the gory details are in the public RFC: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/RF... This blog post just discusses the last point, but please AMA.
In Why CockroachDB doesn't use EvalPlanQual
nvanbenschoten·Dec 20, 2023
> Cockroach only allow SERIALIZABLE transactions so the unviability of SERIALIZABLE seems questionable. We've actually been hard at work on adding Read Committed and Repeatable Read isolation into CockroachDB. The risks of weak isolation levels are real, but they do have a role in SQL databases. We did our best to avoid the pitfalls and inconsistencies of MySQL and even PostgreSQL by defining clear read snapshot scopes (statement vs. transaction). The preview release for both will be dropping in Jan. Some links if you're interested: - RFC: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/RF... - Hermitage test: https://github.com/ept/hermitage/blob/master/cockroachdb.md
In Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34

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