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

Interactions with the disk for data storage

The storage layer is responsible for reading from and writing to the disk. Each node in a CockroachDB cluster should have at least one storage attachment. Data is stored as key-value pairs on the disk using a storage engine.

Storage engine

A database management system (DBMS) uses a storage engine to perform CRUD (which stands for create, read, update, and delete) operations on the disk. Usually, the storage engine acts as a black box, so you get more options to choose from based on your own requirements, and also, storage engines evolve independently of the DBMSes that are using them.

Storage engines use a variety of data structures to store data. The popular ones are listed here:

  • Hash table
  • B+ tree
  • Heap
  • Log-structured merge-tree (LSM-tree)

Storage engines also work with a wide range of storage types, including the following:

  • Solid-state drive (SSD)
  • Flash storage
  • Hard disk
  • Remote...