Cockroach Labs, provider of the distributed, cloud-native SQL database CockroachDB, was able to double both the number of its customers and sales in the past year, as the company announced in a blog post without disclosing any specific financial data. In order to be able to continue financing the growth, however, Cockroach Labs secured itself within the framework of a new financing round 160 millions of US- Dollar fresh capital from the investment firms Altimeter Capital, Greenoaks, Lone Pine, Benchmark, BOND, FirstMark, GV, Index Ventures and Tiger Global.

Like Cockroach Labs, which is emulating the warehouse-as-a-service provider Snowflake, the investors apparently also trust in the steadily growing demand for modern, flexibly scalable database systems. In the year of the corona pandemic, Cockroach Labs was able to benefit from the trends towards more remote and home office work as well as accelerated digital transformation and was able to win new customers from both start-ups that need highly scalable systems and established companies who wanted their Want to update the data infrastructure and make it more resilient.

CockroachDB, version 1.0 middle 2017 is one of the so-called NewSQL systems that are typically based on a relational data model and use SQL as the query language. Like NoSQL databases, it also meets high requirements for scalability and flexibility. The company 2015 founded by former Google employees chose the name Cockroach to give users of the database an association with resilience and to awaken the stamina of cockroaches. Because the CockroachDB servers always come in groups, so that the entire (data) inventory is not immediately at risk if a node dies.

Scalable and resilient CockroachDB primarily competes with comparable offers such as Google Cloud Spanner, on whose open source project the database is based. It strictly supports ACID transactions (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) and, as a distributed SQL database, builds on a transactional and consistent key-value store, for which the developers at Cockroach Labs rely on RocksDB. CockroachDB also wants to score points, unlike many competitors, by being independent of the large cloud providers. Since autumn 2019 the company has been offering its own managed cloud service CockroachDB as a Service, which is available to users on different platforms such as AWS or Use Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

(Image: Albert Hulm)

Distributed databases with CockroachDB While common SQL Databases like MySQL have difficulties with scaling, CockroachDB is designed to run synchronously on many servers.

According to Cockroach Labs, this DBaaS is so popular among the company’s new customers that it is now more than the Half of all CockroachDB users work with it. As industry experts point out, however, the NewSQL database is primarily suitable for use in new projects or applications that require extensive adaptation, while MariaDB SkySQL, for example, can also port decades-old compatible applications to the cloud in a simpler way.

Hybrid license model instead of open source From the point of view of developers, it is also important keep an eye on Cockroach Labs’ licensing policy. While the database was originally generally freely available under the Apache 2.0 license, the Business Source License (BSL) has been in effect since the middle 2019 ). It prohibits the commercial distribution of a CockroachDB as a service without a license that is subject to a fee. Cockroach Labs is thus following the example of other database providers – including Redis, MongoDB, Confluent and MariaDB – who want to protect their open source applications from what they believe to be misuse by cloud service providers. Since then, the core edition of CockroachDB is no longer an OSS in the sense of the OSI definition, but the source code is still freely available and the database can still be used free of charge in many fields of application with an unlimited number of nodes.

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