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

Different types of indexes

Based on the query pattern and columns in the table, you should decide what kind of index is going to help with the performance.

The following are the types of indexes available in CockroachDB:

  • Primary index
  • Secondary index
  • Hash-sharded index
  • Duplicate indexes
  • Inverted indexes
  • Partial indexes
  • Spatial indexes
  • Table joins and indexes
  • Best practices while using indexes

In the next set of subsections, we are going to discuss each type of index and when to use them, starting with the primary index.

Primary indexes

A primary key uniquely identifies a given row in a table. This means that the primary key is unique for a given row and duplicate values or NULLs are not allowed. An index created for a primary key is called a primary index.

Whenever you create a table in CockroachDB, it's recommended to have an explicit primary key, so that CockroachDB automatically creates an index for it, which can...