Kishen Das Kondabagilu Rajanna - Getting Started with CockroachDB: A guide to implementing a modern cloud-native and distributed SQL database for your data-intensive apps

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Early Access Publication: Getting Started with CockroachDB

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Getting Started with CockroachDB

1. CockroachDB - A Brief Introduction
2. How Does CockroachDB Work Internally?
3. Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID)
4. Geo-Partitioning
5. Fault Tolerance and Auto-Rebalancing
6. How Indexes Work in CockroachDB
7. Schema Creation and Management
8. Exploring Admin User Interface
9. Security Aspects
10. Troubleshooting Issues

In this chapter, we will go over the history of databases, where we will learn about the evolution of SQL, NoSQL, and NewSQL databases, various relational models, different categories for classifying databases, and timelines. Later, we will discuss the CAP theorem. Finally, we will briefly discuss the motivation for creating a new database and learn about the basic architecture of CockroachDB.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• History and evolution of databases
• Database concepts
• CAP theorem
• CockroachDB

A database is a collection of data that can be organized, managed, modified, and retrieved using a computer. The system that helps with managing data in a database is called a database management system (DBMS).

In the 1950s and 1960s, several advancements were made in terms of processors, storage, memory, and networks. We also had our first programming languages, COBOL and FORTRAN. The development of hard disk drives for data storage further spurred the development of databases. Around the same time, the first notion of a modern-day computer with a mouse and graphical user interface came into existence, making it easy for the general public to consume it. In this section, we will discuss how various types of databases evolved.

The first database was designed by Charles William Bachman III, an American computer scientist. In 1963, he developed the Integrated Data Store (IDS), which gave rise to the concept of the navigational database. In navigational databases, we can find records by chasing references from other objects. For example, lets say that in a school database, you want to find all the students from a specific grade in a specific school. In a navigational database, first, you have to go to the group of students that belong to a particular school and then to the group that belongs to a particular grade. So, records can be accessed by hierarchical navigation. Based on IDS, Bachman later developed the CODASYL database model in 1969. CODASYL stands for Conference/Committee on Data Systems Languages, which was a consortium to guide the development of programming languages. Around the same time Edgar F. Codd, an IBM employee, developed the IBM Information Management System (IMS), which was based on the hierarchical database model. A hierarchical database model is a data model in which the data is designed in a tree-like structure. In 1970, Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce developed Structured Query Language (SQL) based on what theyd learned about IMS. They initially called it Structured English Query Language (SEQUEL), which System R was later developed with by a group at the IBM San Jose research laboratory. In 1976, QUEL, which is a relational database query language designed by Michael Ralph Stonebraker, was developed as part of the Interactive Graphics Retrieval System (INGRES) database management system at the University of California, Berkeley.

Based on QUEL and SQL, several databases were implemented. Some of the most prominent ones include Post Ingres (Postgres), Sybase, Microsoft SQL, IBM DB2, Oracle, MariaDB, and MySQL.

In the 1980s, object-oriented database systems (OODBMSes) grew in popularity. In OODBMSes, information is represented as objects compared to tables in relational databases. Some of the important ones include Gemstone/S, Objectivity/DB, InterSystems Cache, Perst, ZODB, Wakanda, ObjectDB, ODABA, and Realm.

The concept of non-SQL or non-relational databases has existed since the 1960s, but the term NoSQL became has much more popular in the last decade. NoSQL databases focus on performance and scaling and mostly rely on a non-relational data model such as a document, key-value, wide-column, or graph to organize the data. Some of the most popular ones in this category include