CockroachDB is an open source distributed database inspired by the white paper Spanner: Google's distributed database. In CockroachDB, data is automatically divided into ranges, usually 64MB, and distributed across nodes in the cluster. Each range has a consensus group and, because it uses the Raft consensus algorithm, the data is always kept in sync. With its unique design, CockroachDB provides distributed transactions and geo-partitioning while still supporting SQL. Unlike Spanner, which relies on TrueTime with atomic clock for linearizability, CockroachDB uses NTP for clock synchronization and provides serializability as the default isolation level. If you're working with structured data that fits in a single node, then choose a traditional relational database. However, if your data needs to scale across nodes, be consistent and survive failures, then we recommend you take a closer look at CockroachDB.
