The developer of the high-performance database looks to balance new capabilities like AI vector search while also meeting the mission-critical demands of customers migrating off legacy database systems.

Cockroach Labs has debuted a new release of its high-performance distributed database with next-generation AI capabilities and a new service tier for its CockroachDB Cloud offering.

The CockroachDB 24.2 release comes as businesses and organizations are looking for high levels of system performance, continuity and availability as they migrate off legacy databases, while at the same time demanding new capabilities like AI to support today’s operational applications.

“The core of our business is companies that are looking at what they’re going to do with databases in the next decade and how they’re going to modernize, how they’re going to move things that are currently on mainframes, for example, into the richer ecosystems of the public cloud,” said Spencer Kimball, Cockroach Labs co-founder and CEO, (pictured) in an interview with CRN.

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CockroachDB is a next-generation, distributed SQL database that’s build for high-volume, mission-critical transaction processing applications and is designed to be highly available and scalable. (The company’s name comes from cockroaches’ ability to thrive anywhere and be disaster resistant.)

Cockroach Labs offerings, led by its CockroachDB Cloud, is positioned as an alternative to legacy database systems, Kimball said. While the database has been adopted by customers across a wide swath of industries, it’s strongest in financial services and IT SaaS applications. (Many customers also operate CockroachDB on a self-hosted basis, either in their own data centers, a private cloud or hosted on a public cloud platform.)

Such customers want to migrate to next-generation databases to take advantage of new capabilities such as generative AI and cloud computing, Kimball said, but they still need the scale, resilience, high-availability and enterprise-grade security of their legacy databases. And that presents challenges for IT vendors like Cockroach Labs.

“It’s a very difficult product roadmap,” Kimball said. “We have to both build a next-generation database that runs, for example, across all the cloud vendors, maybe has to run hybrid, has to run near the mainframes – maybe on the mainframes in some cases. But despite being next generation, it also has to do all the things that these legacy architectures did.”

“You have to tackle both because you can’t modernize and migrate use cases if you don’t have the kinds of surface areas that these very legacy, but important, workloads require,” the CEO said. “You also have to do all the new things: You have to scale to new levels, you have to deal with distributed geographies, and you have to introduce a new kind of resilience that makes the move from mainframes something that’s worthwhile and safe.”

And while CockroachDB isn’t specifically designed for heavy data analytics tasks, it often must integrate with analytics systems that need data from an organization’s transaction processing “system of record,” according to Kimball.

Cockroach Labs has also been busy establishing alliances with cloud service providers and global systems integrators as part of its effort to meet the needs of customers moving from legacy databases to CockroachDB. The company, for example, has expanded its collaboration with SI partners PwC UK and mLogica who focus on mainframe modernization and “comprehensive cloud and data solutions,” according to announcement.

“All of these different players are necessary in conjunction to really make one of these [migration] projects practical. Because, as you can imagine, some of these legacy data architectures are decades old,” Kimball said. And he noted that AI “has a lot to offer” in reducing the complexity and costs of those projects.

New AI Capabilities

The new CockroachDB 24.2 release includes new vector search capabilities that leverage pgvector-compatible semantics for high-performance similarity searches and recommendation systems – a key use for operational data today. (Pgvector is an open-source extension for PostgreSQL that allows users to store, index and query vector data.)

Vector search is critical for optimizing AI performance and accuracy. Kimball said it also plays a role in working with complex data types such as images and audio files stored in databases.

And the CEO noted that AI adoption in general is increasing demand for scalable database systems like Cockroach. “That’s not because Cockroach is specifically providing some new capability that’s AI related. It’s simply because AI use cases can often reach dramatic levels of scale quickly,” he said.

Also new in CockroachDB 24.2 are Generic Query Plans that reduce query latency and optimize resource usage, enhancing efficiency for complex database queries, according to the company.

New “Standard” Cloud Price Tier

While enterprise-scale cloud database services for mission-critical applications have been the major focus for the company’s managed CockroachDB Cloud, Kimbell said there is growing demand for database services for applications one or two tiers lower in terms of operational criticality. So the company is now offering a new “Standard” tier book-ended by the Advanced and Basic tiers the company now provides.

In one example, the Advanced tier provides hardware and database instances dedicated to a customer application and provides capacity headroom for peak workloads. Standard services, meanwhile, may operate using shared resources – and so offer lower costs through better capacity utilization, Kimball explained.

“That allows us to create a better economic price point. But you still get the same cockroach differentiators,” Kimball said. “We add all these different ways of consuming Cockroach to meet the customer where they currently are in their journey.”

The CEO noted that Cockroach Labs works with about 60 seller partners, including global systems integrators, cloud service providers and resellers, the later including Carahsoft, CBTS, Computacenter, Insight, Sirius and SoftwareONE, according to the company’s website. The new service tier, which Kimball said partners can sell, provides them with more options to meet customers’ requirements.

“This streamlined, tiered approach eliminates the need for multiple disparate solutions, allowing organizations to consolidate their cloud strategies around a single, powerful platform that evolves with their needs,” said Peter Mattis, CTO/CPO of Cockroach Labs, in the company announcement. “By unifying the customer experience and simplifying the deployment process, the updates to CockroachDB Cloud now minimize operational overhead and enhance agility, enabling businesses to focus on innovation and growth.”

In another move to offer more options for customers, Cockroach Labs introduced an AWS Pay-As-You-Go listing earlier this year that the company says provides businesses with flexible, on-demand access to CockroachDB, simplifying cost management and deployment. “The expanded partnership will also include deeper integrations with AWS tools like Amazon Redshift and Glue, as well as enhanced AI functionalities through pg-vector and AWS Bedrock,” according to the company announcement.