CockroachDB vs YugabyteDB: What are the differences?

Introduction

CockroachDB and YugabyteDB are both distributed SQL databases that aim to provide scalable and highly available data storage solutions. While they share common objectives, there are key differences that set them apart.

1. SQL Compatibility: CockroachDB is known for its high degree of SQL compatibility, supporting PostgreSQL wire protocol and a majority of MySQL syntax. On the other hand, YugabyteDB focuses on PostgreSQL compatibility, supporting the PostgreSQL wire protocol and most of its dialect, including stored procedures, triggers, and user-defined types.

2. Architecture: CockroachDB follows a highly distributed architecture inspired by Google's Spanner, where data is automatically sharded and distributed across multiple nodes. It relies on a transactional consensus algorithm to ensure consistency. In contrast, YugabyteDB utilizes a distributed architecture based on Google's Bigtable and HBase, where data is partitioned and distributed via tablets. It employs Raft or the two-phase commit protocol for data consistency.

3. Data Distribution: CockroachDB uses range partitioning to distribute data evenly across nodes, allowing automatic rebalancing to handle node failures and adding new nodes seamlessly. YugabyteDB, however, employs hash partitioning to evenly distribute data across nodes. This approach allows efficient parallelism and avoids hotspots when dealing with specific key ranges.

4. Multi-Cloud Deployment: CockroachDB focuses heavily on multi-cloud support, allowing data to be distributed across multiple cloud providers or regions seamlessly. It provides built-in synchronization and conflict resolution mechanisms for data consistency. In contrast, while YugabyteDB also supports multi-cloud deployments, its primary emphasis is on self-driving and the ability to span across multiple data centers seamlessly.

5. Consistency Models: CockroachDB provides strong consistency guarantees through its implementation of linearizable and serializable isolation levels. It allows transaction retry in case of conflicts and performs automatic resolution. YugabyteDB, on the other hand, provides tunable consistency models, allowing developers to choose between strong consistency, read-after-write, or last-write-wins semantics for specific operations.

6. Programming Languages: CockroachDB primarily supports SQL for queries and interactions, making it preferable for developers already acquainted with SQL-based databases. In contrast, YugabyteDB offers support for multiple programming languages, including SQL, NoSQL APIs (like Cassandra Query Language), and native client libraries, enabling developers to choose their preferred programming language and interact with the database in a more diverse manner.

In summary, CockroachDB and YugabyteDB differ substantially in SQL compatibility, architecture, data distribution methods, multi-cloud deployment focus, consistency models, and supported programming languages.