Incorporating a relational database management system (RDBMS) into your application’s workflow can significantly enhance data management capabilities. As user traffic increases, a database with robust scalability features can help you manage concurrent user requests efficiently.
Among the numerous RDBMS options available, CockroachDB and SQL Server are two popular choices. However, selecting a suitable database solution, especially in terms of price or performance, can be challenging.
This article highlights the key aspects that differentiate CockroachDB vs SQL Server. It will provide you with sufficient information to select an appropriate database for your data needs.
An Overview of CockroachDB
CockroachDB is a cloud-based SQL database that is designed to help you develop, scale, and manage data-driven applications. With its distributed architecture, it allows you to effortlessly scale applications to handle increasing user queries and provides high availability to overcome system failures.
CockroachDB has a shared-nothing, multi-leader architecture, and it automatically distributes data across multiple nodes, or clusters. In this type of architecture, any single node can handle read and write operations without the interference of the deployment topology. It supports single-region and multi-region setups.
Key Features of CockroachDB
- Scalability: CockroachDB is highly scalable, allowing you to handle increasing data and transaction volumes. It supports horizontal scalability; you can add or remove nodes to and from the cluster to manage increasing business demands while maintaining system performance.
- Consistency: CockroachDB ensures data consistency across all nodes using the atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) principles. Every copy of data across all nodes will accurately reflect the same state. This helps ensure data integrity throughout your system.
- Failover Protection: Its distributed nature facilitates data replication across multiple nodes, promoting fault tolerance and high availability. This makes the data accessible even during instances such as hardware failure or maintenance.
- Database Compatibility: CockroachDB supports the majority of PostgreSQL syntax. Its compatibility with PostgreSQL’s wire protocol enables you to migrate existing applications built on PostgreSQL without altering the code structure.
- Flexible Deployment Options: Depending on the application type and the workloads, CockroachDB offers flexible deployment options. The key deployment options are Standard, Advanced, and Self-hosted.
An Overview of SQL Server
Developed by Microsoft Corporation, SQL Server, also known as MS SQL Server, is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Like other relational models, it offers referential integrity and other integrity constraints, along with ACID properties, which help you maintain data consistency.
Using Transact-SQL (T-SQL), a proprietary query language, SQL Server facilitates communication with other SQL Server instances to perform various tasks. Some common operations include transaction processing, business intelligence, and data analytics, enabling you to generate actionable insights from your data.
Key Features of SQL Server
- Master Data Services (MDS): The MS SQL Server MDS is a data management solution that supports features like hierarchies, transactions, granular security, and data versioning. You can use this feature to manage different domains, including products, accounts, and customers.
- Data Virtualization: With PolyBase, an SQL Server feature, you can query data from multiple sources directly within your SQL Server instance without installing client connection software. Supported data sources include Teradata, Oracle, Hadoop clusters, S3-compatible object storage, and Cosmos DB.
- Analytics Features: Using Analysis Services offered by SQL Server, you can manage data mining and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) applications.
- Reporting Services: SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is an extensible platform that includes server and client components. Using this tool, you can develop, manage, and deploy tabular, graphical, matrix, and free-form report applications.
- Security: SQL Server offers advanced security features, such as data encryption, authorization, masking, and monitoring, to protect your data from cyber-attacks.
CockroachDB vs SQL Server - Detailed Comparison
The main difference between CockroachDB and SQL Server is that CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database designed for scalability and fault tolerance across multiple nodes, while SQL Server is a centralized relational database optimized for transactional processing and enterprise applications.
Scalability
CockroachDB is optimized to handle large-scale data with its distributed architecture. It enables you to effortlessly scale applications by adding or removing nodes to redistribute the data. With CockroachDB’s built-in topology patterns, you can allocate data across different locations for optimized data placement and access.
On the other hand, SQL Server offers read replicas and log shipping to distribute read-only workloads to multiple servers. However, write operations are limited to a single node, reducing the capabilities of horizontal scaling. Despite SQL Server lacking native horizontal scalability, you can use manual sharding and partitioning to enhance write scalability.
Fault Tolerance
Fault tolerance is the system's capability to overcome outages or primary node failure without losing functionality. As a distributed and node-based system, CockroachDB ensures continuity and data availability even when the primary node fails. It also provides impressive flexibility in scaling while maintaining system reliability.
On the contrary, SQL Server employs failover clustering services and database mirroring for fault tolerance. The failover clusters are of two types: single-site and multi-site. In a single-site cluster, you can use multiple servers or nodes. If one node fails, the workload is automatically transferred to another node. Multi-site clusters involve nodes at different sites and do not depend on shared storage. Similar to failover clusters, database mirroring enables you to mirror the entire database, providing data accessibility during node failures.
Consistency
CockroachDB offers a high degree of consistency by implementing the SERIALIZABLE isolation level for transactions. This ensures that while transactions may execute in parallel, the result remains the same as if they were executed one at a time. Maintaining order in the transactions enhances data integrity, especially while conducting concurrent transactional operations.
In hindsight, SQL Server utilizes locking and concurrency control mechanisms to ensure data consistency in a multi-user environment. The locking mechanism allows you to restrict data access and modification to avoid conflicts. With concurrency control, you can prevent lost updates and deletes, ensuring database consistency.
Geographic Distribution
CockroachDB is natively geo-distributed, offering multi-regional deployments. Distributing the data across multiple geographical regions enhances its accessibility for globally dispersed users.
In contrast, SQL Server does not support geo-distribution in its cloud services. However, it offers a geo-redundancy through features like Always On Availability Groups and Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), an on-premise authentication technology. These features allow you to replicate data across geographical locations, facilitating application failover and guaranteeing data availability in the event of site-specific failures.
Pricing
CockroachDB pricing offers different options depending on the deployment model you choose.
The plans include:
- Basic: Free starting plan; available on GCP and AWS.
- Standard: Starts at $146 per month; includes two vCPUs with instant scaling up to 60 vCPUs.
- Advanced: Starts from $476 per month; includes four vCPUs with unlimited scaling.
- Self-hosted: Flexible pricing options available across private or public clouds and on-premise data centers.
SQL Server, on the other hand, offers multiple pricing options depending on the edition you choose. The pricing for the most common SQL Server 2022 editions are:
- Enterprise: Starting from approximately $15,123 per core.
- Standard - Per Core: Starts from $3,945 per core.
- Standard - Server: Starts from $989 per server.
- Developer and Express: Free-to-use plans.
Simplify Data Migration into CockroachDB/SQL Server with Airbyte
The comparison between CockroachDB vs SQL Server presents the unique strengths of each platform. After you’ve selected the RDBMS that best suits your data needs, the next crucial step is to connect your data with the platform. To streamline data replication from multiple sources into your preferred database, you can use no-code tools like Airbyte. Leveraging its capabilities, you can automate data migration, whether to CockroachDB or MS SQL Server.
Airbyte is a SaaS-based data integration solution that you can use to replicate data from numerous sources into the destination of your preference. Offering over 400 pre-built data connectors, it simplifies your data migration process, enabling you to effortlessly integrate multiple platforms. If the data source connector you seek is unavailable, you can leverage Airbyte’s Connector Development Kit (CDK) to build custom connectors in under 30 minutes.
Here are some of the key features that Airbyte offers:
- Automate Configuring Data Pipelines: Airbyte’s Terraform Provider allows you to leverage Terraform—infrastructure as a code (IaC) solution—to manage resources, such as connections, sources, and destinations. With this feature, you can define and provision pipeline infrastructure using code.
- Change Data Capture: The CDC feature enables you to identify and automatically replicate the incremental changes from the source file to the destination. This feature helps you keep track of the updates while ensuring data consistency.
- Custom Transformations Using dbt: The Airbyte Cloud version offers data build tool (dbt) integration, allowing you to transform raw data into a format suitable for analysis and reporting.
- Advanced Security: Airbyte complies with popular industry-specific regulations, including SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO 27001, safeguarding your data from unauthorized access.
- Community Support: With an active community of more than 15,000 users and 800+ contributors, Airbyte provides you access to community-driven resources, connectors, and plugins.
Conclusion
When choosing a database between CockroachDB vs SQL Server, it is essential to understand the key aspects that differentiate them.
Among the multiple attributes that can help you better understand the differences between CockroachDB and SQL Server, critical ones are scalability, fault tolerance, and pricing.
CockroachDB is a horizontally scalable relational database management system that provides better features to overcome system failures. Conversely, SQL Server is proprietary software that offers high-performance capabilities while managing OLAP workloads or when your organization uses the Microsoft ecosystem.