Book Image

Getting Started with CockroachDB

By : Kishen Das Kondabagilu Rajanna
Book Image

Getting Started with CockroachDB

By: Kishen Das Kondabagilu Rajanna

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting to Know CockroachDB
4
Section 2: Exploring the Important Features of CockroachDB
9
Section 3: Working with CockroachDB
Appendix: Bibliography and Additional Resources

Managing schema changes

CockroachDB supports online schema changes, which don't require any downtime. An existing schema can be changed using statements that include ALTER and CREATE INDEX operations.

CockroachDB internally maintains a consistent distributed schema cache, along with consistent table data that works with multiple versions of the schema concurrently. This enables the rolling out of a new schema while the older schema is still being used. CockroachDB backfills the table data into the newer schema without holding locks. So, online schema changes don't affect the current read/write operations on the cluster on a particular table whose schema is being modified.

Here are some of the benefits of online schema changes:

  • Zero downtime.
  • Schema changes happen without holding any table-level locks, so application workloads on the cluster can continue to operate without performance degradation.
  • Data is kept consistent throughout the schema upgrade...