Why CockroachDB and PostgreSQL Are Compatible
Written by
on Dec 1, 2020
CockroachDB is built to be largely compatible with PostgreSQL, meaning that software written to use PostgreSQL can often be used with CockroachDB without changes.
Why is CockroachDB compatible with PostgreSQL?
Perhaps surprisingly, at the time of writing (early May 2018), the answer to this question had not been documented publicly on the CockroachDB web site, nor in the CockroachDB docs, nor in CockroachDB-related articles in third party sources.
I was lucky to sit next to Cockroach Labs Chief Architect and Co-Founder Ben Darnell when Lakshmi Kannan, now the general manager of CockroachCloud, asked us the very same question: Why was CockroachDB designed to be compatible with PostgreSQL? What follows is an extended rewording of the resulting discussion.
How We Built Scalable Spatial Data & Spatial Indexing in CockroachDB
Written by
on Dec 9, 2020
Support for spatial data and spatial indexing is one of the most requested features in the history of CockroachDB. The first issue requesting spatial data in CockroachDB was opened in October 2017, and closed on November 12, 2020 with the release of spatial data storage in CockroachDB 20.2.
Spatial data, sometimes called geospatial data, is data that contains information about geographic (and geometric) features, with PostGIS being one of the most popular spatial data extensions in use. CockroachDB’s spatial data storage and processing features are compatible with PostGIS, while also providing the scale and resilience of CockroachDB.