Applications built in the cloud are often serving requests from all around the world. A user in Hong Kong could have written to a database entry at the moment just before a user in San Francisco and a user in Germany simultaneously try to read from that database. If the user in San Francisco is allowed to see a different database entry than the user in Germany, that database is not strongly consistent.

Strongly consistent databases work such that two users who read the same entry at the same time will receive the same result. Weakly consistent or “eventual consistent” databases are suitable for applications where transaction ordering is not important–photo sharing apps and ecommerce shopping carts, for example. Bank accounts, on the other hand, often need to be strongly consistent.

CockroachDB is a scalable, survivable, strongly consistent database. Alex Robinson is an engineer at Cockroach Labs and he joins the show to explain the data model for CockroachDB and how it maintains strong consistency.

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