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CockroachDB

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CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built by Cockroach Labs to support systems that cannot fail, in sectors such as payments, identity, and AI infrastructure.

Last updated September 15, 2026

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Overview

CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database from Cockroach Labs, a company founded in 2015 by three former Google engineers: Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell. According to Cockroach Labs, the database is built to support systems that cannot fail in sectors like payments, identity, and AI infrastructure. Cockroach Labs states that CockroachDB runs workloads that cannot fail, with banks, payment networks, and health systems among those where an outage is a headline and a lost transaction a liability. The company also offers Cockroach Continuum, described as an Agentic Database Cloud built on CockroachDB, adding storage and compute elasticity along with agentic operations.

History

Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 by three former Google engineers: Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell. According to Cockroach Labs, Kimball and Mattis met Darnell at Google, where they spent a decade building infrastructure at a scale not seen elsewhere at the time. When Kimball and Mattis left to build a photo-sharing company, they encountered the limitations of available databases and an unacceptable trade-off between resilience at scale and transactional correctness. That experience sparked the idea for CockroachDB. Kimball wrote the first design in 2014 and shared it on GitHub. The project won Open Source Rookie of the Year before it had a business plan. The following year, Benchmark Capital led a $6.3 million seed round, with Google Ventures, Sequoia and FirstMark alongside. Their premise was that the trade-off wasn't necessary: a database could lose a machine, a data center or a region and still keep every transaction correct. Cockroach Labs states that CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built to support systems that cannot fail in sectors like payments, identity, and AI infrastructure. A decade on, Cockroach Labs built Continuum to keep thousands of databases correct while they appear, grow and disappear on their own.

Products and positioning

A distributed SQL database built to support systems that cannot fail, with a focus on correctness, resilience, and scale.

  • CockroachDB

    A distributed SQL database built to support systems that cannot fail in sectors like payments, identity, and AI infrastructure.

  • Cockroach Continuum

    An Agentic Database Cloud built on CockroachDB, adding storage and compute elasticity along with agentic operations.

Recent events

  • Reported

    CockroachDB achieves Red Hat Container Certification[5]

    Cockroach Labs announced that CockroachDB had achieved Red Hat Container Certification, and said the certified container was available in the Red Hat customer registry.

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