Speaker: Rebecca Taft
Location: Soda 510
Date: September 20th, 2024
Time: 12pm-1pm PDT
Title: CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database
Abstract:
We live in an increasingly interconnected world, with many organizations operating across countries or even continents. To serve their global user base, organizations are replacing their legacy DBMSs with cloud-based systems capable of scaling OLTP workloads to millions of users. CockroachDB is a scalable SQL DBMS that was built from the ground up to support these global OLTP workloads while maintaining high availability and strong consistency. Just like its namesake, CockroachDB is resilient to disasters through replication and automatic recovery mechanisms.
In this talk, I’ll give an overview of the architecture of CockroachDB and its novel transaction model that supports consistent geo-distributed transactions without the use of specialized hardware. I will describe how CockroachDB replicates and distributes data to achieve fault tolerance and high performance, as well as how its distributed SQL layer automatically scales with the size of the database cluster while providing the standard SQL interface that users expect. I’ll share some of the work we’ve done to improve the experience of users building applications on CockroachDB that span multiple geographic regions. Finally, I’ll describe our recent efforts to “meet customers where they are” by building features to ease migration of legacy applications to CockroachDB and reduce cost-to-serve.
Bio:
Becca is the Engineering Manager of the SQL Queries and Change Data Capture teams at Cockroach Labs. During her 7 years at the company, she helped build the cost-based query optimizer from scratch and added support for features such as geospatial indexing and locality-optimized search in multi-region clusters. Prior to joining Cockroach Labs, she was a graduate student at MIT, where she worked with Professor Michael Stonebraker researching distributed database elasticity and multi-tenancy. Becca holds a B.S. in Physics from Yale University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. Outside of work, her 13-month-old son keeps her busy.