Cockroach Labs Inc., maker of the distributed and extremely resilient CockroachDB database, today announced a major update to that platform.

The company said today the new version, CockroachDB 22.1, will enable application updates across the entire development lifecycle. According to the company, that means developers using the platform will be able to build applications that scale with far less effort.

CockroachDB is a cloud-native Structured Query Language database that’s noted for its high resiliency and its compatibility with Kubernetes, which is open-source software used to manage modern, container-based applications. The name is a nod to CockroachDB’s resilience, with the company claiming the database will remain accessible even during a major technical malfunction, such as an entire rack of servers inside a data center going offline.

Today’s update brings new automation features to CockroachDB, allowing engineering teams to prototype faster, automate more operations and ensure peak performance even when transactions spike, the company said.

“From prototype to production, from production to massive scale, building with CockroachDB 22.1 means the database you use to get off the ground is the same one you’ll use as your application and customer base diversifies and grows,” Cockroach Labs Chief Product Officer Nate Stewart said in a statement.

One of the headline features in the release is the introduction of a command-line tool that allows users to manage and scale CockroachDB via code. It marks the first time users will be able to access an application programming interface to control the database, said Cockroach’s recovering developer and product evangelist Jim Walker in an interview with The Register.

He explained that developers will be able to use the API to control CockroachDB’s environment more easily, adding or removing nodes, starting new clusters and the like.

Additional updates in today’s release include support for time-to-live data, a new feature requested by users that makes it possible to set a lifespan for row-level data. Walker said this would be useful for developers who don’t want data to live forever because of security concerns. Automated expiration has been available in other databases, including Oracle Corp.’s, so its arrival in CockroachDB is a key sign of the product’s maturity, Walker added.

CockroachDB 22.1 also adds super-regions that group multiple cloud regions into a larger geographical area, to address data domiciling regulations for multi-regional and multinational businesses. Other Updates include quality of service prioritization, admission control and hot spot detection to improve performance during times of heavy use, and various other performance optimizations, the company said.

The update is the first to land since Cockroach Labs closed on a bumper $278 million funding round in December that brought its valuation to a cool $5 billion.

Cockroach Labs is well-funded because it needs to be. It’s taking on multiple competitors in a crowded database market, including the likes of Oracle, DataStax Inc., IBM Corp., Cloudera Inc., Databricks Inc. and, of course, cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC.

The company received another boost in December when it was named in Gartner Inc.’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems for the first time.

“This product reflects the maturity of CockroachDB as a cloud database management system for transactional workloads, and the increasing interest in distributed transactional databases in the market,” Gartner said in its report.

Image: Cockroach Labs