Whether you ask an early-stage startup or a globally growing company, they will all tell you how seamless CockroachDB is, and that it’s better than the existing distributed SQL databases out there, like MySQL Cluster, Google Spanner, MariaDB Xpand and others.

Some of the notable startups using CockroachDB include Netflix, Comcast, Fortinet, and Rubrik, alongside startups like Blockdaemon, ConverseNow, LaunchDarkly and more. 

In India, the love for CockroachDB is only growing. 

One such exploration led us to Bengaluru-based neobanking startup Fi. The company, in its initial days, was facing the challenge of building a payment system from scratch, and recognised the need for a database that could support long-term growth, scale across regions seamlessly, ensure consistent transactions, comply with data location regulations, and align with their team’s background in Postgres. 

That’s when it turned to CockroachDB. At Cockroach Labs’ first-ever distributed SQL mixer held in Bengaluru last week, Fi’s founding engineer Prasanna Ranganathan said that with CockroachDB, the team was able to scale up rapidly with queries per second doubling from 1.5K to 3.2K and transaction processing increasing from 200 to 400 transactions per second over the past year. 

Cockroach Labs knows India better than most other database companies, thanks to its burgeoning developers’ ecosystem. The company recently expanded its footprint in the country with an office in Bengaluru and the introduction of two new senior leaders — engineering site director Babu Srithar Muthukrishnan and director of recruiting Anand Sudhalayam. 

“The quality and scale of the talent available in India is unparalleled, particularly for engineering, technical support, and the entrepreneurial spirit driving many businesses, making it compelling for us to expand,” Spencer Kimball, cofounder and chief executive of the company told AIM in an exclusive interaction during the mixer. 

The decision to enter the APAC market, beginning in Australia, stemmed from the chief revenue officer Jason Forget’s successful experience in building a skilled go-to-market team in their previous role. Recent discussions with both new and native Indian companies revealed a striking similarity to the Bay Area, where tech companies utilise global shipping, and there is little discernible difference in the business environment.

Due to the fast growth of startups in India and the increasing influence of technical decision-making in the country, “it’s vital for us to establish a go-to-market strategy here, recognising the opportunity to educate developers and chief architects, which also benefits companies globally seeking guidance from Europe and the US,” he shared. 

Growth Story

New York-based Cockroach Labs was founded eight years ago by three former employees of Google: Spencer Kimball, Ben Darnell, and Peter Mattis. Their experience at Google, witnessing the evolution of database usage, particularly the creation of the NoSQL category, inspired them. 

“Despite the success of NoSQL, we observed that as containerisation entered production, there was need for a database that mirrored Google’s, one that was open source and accessible to all companies,” Kimball told us. 

This is how Cockroach Labs was born. The team’s brainchild CockroachDB is a cloud-native database that caters to legacy businesses like SaaS, banks, healthcare, fintechs and retail, offering an operational database capable of always providing the correct answers and storing mission-critical data for various use cases. 

The key benefits of CockroachDB’s cloud-native design include the ability to use on-demand resources in the cloud, scalability by adding machines to the distributed cluster, and the capability to replicate data across different cloud availability zones. This replication ensures data availability even in the face of outages.

Moreover, CockroachDB supports cross-cloud replication, allowing businesses to balance data across multiple cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Kimball chuckled as he revealed the idea behind the unique name ‘CockroachDB’ during the event, and said that it reflects the database’s core philosophy of survivability. The name symbolises the database’s robustness, highlighting its ability to remain operational even in extreme situations, like a hypothetical World War III — much like a cockroach.

The unique differentiator for CockroachDB is its global public cloud integration. “With data centres worldwide, the database can seamlessly expand into new markets without setting up separate services,” added Kimball, highlighting how it enables users to maintain a single, distributed database even when operating in geographically distant regions, offering a unified data store experience across the globe.

Supporting Generative AI Applications

“When it comes to generative AI, the operational database requirements are still evolving,” said Spencer.  While CockroachDB supports vector data types, secondary indexes are currently unavailable. However, the system enables real-time streaming of all database changes through Change Data Capture, allowing the use of this feature to feed search engines like Elasticsearch for finding similar vectors in AI use cases.

Cockroach Labs caters to diverse customer needs, understanding that many, including larger enterprises like banks, may not be at the forefront of AI owing to various concerns like regulatory challenges. The primary goal is to build a versatile database, with current support for AI, especially in feature stores, while maintaining the core focus on being a reliable system of record—the source of truth for all business data.

But one question keeps looming: Is it possible that we lack sufficient use cases to demonstrate the benefits of Cockroach? This could be a period of waiting for feedback, especially with challenges related to handling inaccurate data. 

“Building trust in a database is a lengthy process; it takes around 10 years for people to trust transitioning from cloud vendor databases to multi-cloud setups or from traditional databases to mainframes,” said Kimball.

However, as generative AI advances, Cockroach Labs aims to fold in additional modalities and features specific to handling unique aspects, ensuring its reliability as a system of record while adapting to new use cases and capabilities.