Cockroach Labs

Ask a DBA what their week looks like and you’ll hear a familiar list: provisioning requests, capacity planning, failover runbooks, and firefighting. That operating model worked when a DBA managed 10 or 15 databases. It doesn’t work when the estate grows to 150. The DBA role isn’t disappearing. It’s evolving from operating individual clusters to designing how the entire database estate runs. Why is the traditional operating model breaking? Three forces are accelerating database growth.

Between a Wednesday evening and a Friday afternoon in April, MOLT, the tool Cockroach Labs ships for migrating databases to CockroachDB, gained the ability to migrate from IBM Db2 sources. Db2, one of the first commercially available relational databases, has a rich SQL dialect, a complex type system, and a native wire protocol.

We've introduced Cockroach Aegis, an always-on system of intelligent agents for CockroachDB, available now in preview as part of Cockroach Continuum. Aegis continuously learns your cluster's workload, tracks every notable operational event, and builds a living memory of what normal looks like. It uses that memory to surface problems you'd otherwise miss, explain why they're happening, and tell you exactly what to do about them through recommendations.

Peter Mattis, co-founder and CTO of Cockroach Labs, recently sat down with Gergely Orosz on The Pragmatic Engineer podcast. The conversation covered the database fundamentals behind CockroachDB and how AI is changing the way our engineers build it. Here are the themes worth your time.

AI agents are moving fast from demos into production. They’re writing code, running pipelines, diagnosing incidents. But there's a catch: most of them forget everything the moment a session ends. So this summer, CockroachDB challenged developers worldwide to fix that.

AI agents are creating databases faster than humans can manage them all while compute-capacity is more scarce than ever. Cockroach Continuum shifts the operating model from individual clusters to a resilient estate managed at machine speed to deliver better TCO economics for databases in the agentic era. Here are ten reasons companies should choose Cockroach Continuum as their Agentic Database Cloud. 1.

The database estate keeps growing, and so does the work of running the databases underneath them. Most teams want to hand that work to a vendor. Many of them can't, because their data has to stay in their own cloud account. Until now, those two needs have been pulled in opposite directions: a fully managed service runs the database in the vendor's account, and self-hosting keeps it in yours but leaves the operations to you.

Every platform team eventually hits the same wall: applications multiply, and one team is left managing separate clusters, maintenance windows, upgrade cycles, and monitoring dashboards. The estate has scaled, but the team has not. This is the tax of the “one workload per cluster” model: Infrastructure costs rise alongside the operating cost of running a growing fleet.

In the past year, generative AI and agentic workflows have dramatically reshaped technology-dependent industries. At Cockroach Labs, we built Mica, an internal system running Claude and CockroachDB, that lets anyone in the company build and share applications using corporate data. Within its first few months, employees built more than 3,000 applications, most backed by CockroachDB. That’s a remarkable number of apps for a company of our size.

Cockroach Labs exists to solve some of the hardest problems in data infrastructure. Our customers rely on us to deliver a database that survives outages, scales globally, and evolves fast enough to meet requirements that change in unpredictable ways. That mission drives every decision we make, including how we manage and distribute our source code. From the beginning, CockroachDB was released as an open-source project.