The company behind the highly scalable CockroachDB SQL database has announced its second major release of the platform.

Cockroach Labs Inc. said that with the update, CockroachDB 2.0 can now handle ten-times the throughput of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Aurora database. In addition, the platform also gains new compliance features that helps customers adhere to new regulations such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation.

CockroachDB is an SQL database that’s been designed to provide extremely high scalability. Introduced in 2015, it serves as a distributed, transactional key-value store that replicates copies of data in multiple locations to ensure it’s always available.

CockroachDB shares many characteristics with Google’s Spanner database system, which is used by the web giant to power its search services. Spanner keeps Google Search ticking by ensuring that indexes of web crawler information are constantly available, and with split-second timing it manages all of the ad servings that accompany searches.

CockroachDB goes beyond what Spanner does, however. That’s because it combines its SQL functionality with the horizontal scalability seen in NoSQL databases. This allows it to distribute data held within the database to provide a feature called “multi-active availability” that protects against failure at any point. Essentially what this means is that CockroachDB stores data in multiple servers, ensuring it’s available even if several of those servers fail.

With version 2.0 of the platform, Cockroach Labs is hoping to address concerns around compliance, particularly the upcoming GDPR regulation in the European Union that’s set to come into force this May. GDPR sets new standards for how companies are supposed to store and use the personally identifiable information of EU citizens. The rules apply to any company that’s based in the EU, in addition to those that collect and use the data of EU residents.

To help customers with this, CockroachDB 2.0 gains a new geopartitioning feature that allows developers to control the movement of data at the databases, table and row level, Cockroach Labs said. The company said this feature provides a “foundational building block” to help users comply with the new regulation.

CockroachDB 2.0 also adds support for JavaScript Object Notation, which is an open-source file format that uses human-readable text to transmit data objects between web browsers and computer servers.

Lastly, CockroachDB gains a significant performance boost. After doing some tweaking and fine-tuning under the hood, CockroachDB 2.0 now can process 62 percent more transactions per second than the older version of the database, while response times have been improved by a massive 544 percent, the company said. These improvements mean that CockroachDB can now scale up to 10 times the maximum throughput achieved by Amazon’s Aurora database, according to Cockroach Labs.

“The journey to 2.0 brought us a database that realizes the inherent promise of the cloud, so that our customers can easily build services that span from a single datacenter to the entire globe and address growing data privacy regulations like GDPR,” cofounder and Chief Executive Officer Spencer Kimball said in a statement.

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