The Cockroach Labs Blog

At its foundation, CockroachDB depends on a key-value storage engine called Pebble. In CockroachDB v25.4, the storage team introduced value separation within Pebble: an optimization that improves compaction efficiency for many workloads. Value separation increases the throughput of the core of CockroachDB, the storage engine, by up to ~50%, depending on the workload, through algorithmic improvements. It reduces redundant I/O, reducing cost-to-serve at scale. We’ll look at how Pebble represents data today, what’s changed, and how that translates to database efficiency.

Jackson Owens

January 13, 2026

Agentic AI systems represent a big shift for artificial intelligence: from stateless inference to autonomous, long-running software agents that plan, reason, act, observe outcomes, and adapt over time. These agents operate continuously, coordinate with other agents and tools, and maintain evolving state across complex workflows.

David Bressler

January 7, 2026

AI workloads have become business-critical applications. Agentic systems, real-time inference, recommendation engines, fraud detection, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are live and impacting the customer experience.

David Weiss

December 30, 2025

High demand should be a good thing, but retailers are now facing a new threat: “success disasters.” In 2026, major retailers will move beyond traditional scaling strategies and start preparing for this different kind of challenge. Not the slow, manageable kind of success, but the sudden surge of popularity that strains even the most carefully planned systems. Success disasters happen when interest spikes, traffic surges, and infrastructure simply can’t keep up.

Rob Reid

December 29, 2025

Real-time AI isn’t a future ambition. It’s today’s business necessity. But powering fast, intelligent experiences in production takes more than just a good model. You need the right data infrastructure behind it.

Becca Weng

December 24, 2025

Every year, the holiday season puts extraordinary pressure on industries we rarely think of as seasonal powerhouses. While retailers dominate the headlines, there are many other companies that also quietly absorb the surge in traffic, transactions, and consumer expectation. Today we’ll focus on travel platforms, gambling and sportsbook operators, and fintech and payment providers. These sectors don’t just experience a bump; they face explosive, non-negotiable spikes that demand unwavering availability, real-time accuracy, and the ability to scale on command.

Becca Weng

December 23, 2025

In today's data-driven world, the continuity of database operations is not just a technical requirement; it's a cornerstone of business success. For applications built on CockroachDB, the inherent resilience provided by its distributed architecture and Raft replication offers a strong foundation for high availability. However, even with this robust fault tolerance, a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan is essential to safeguard against unforeseen, large-scale incidents.

Sai Kiran Kshatriya

December 22, 2025

If 2024 was the year outage anxiety crept into boardrooms, 2025 was the year fragility became impossible to ignore.

David Weiss

December 17, 2025

As GenAI applications evolve from chat interfaces to autonomous agents, they are also introducing real infrastructure challenges. Model hallucinations, service outages, and scaling limitations are common blockers, especially for enterprise teams trying to move beyond proof of concept.

Becca Weng

December 16, 2025