The database industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation as AI reshapes how organisations design and operate their data systems. With billions of human interactions soon to be joined by trillions of AI-driven agents, the demands on infrastructure are unprecedented.
At the centre of this change is a new emphasis on scalability, resilience, and affordability, all while navigating the complexities of multi-cloud environments.
In a conversation with AIM, Spencer Kimball, CEO of CockroachDB, shared his perspective on the company’s current standing in a rapidly evolving database market.
While acknowledging the competition from other players in the space, like MongoDB and AWS, Kimball emphasised CockroachDB’s focus on solving scale, resilience, and multi-cloud challenges.
Scaling for an AI-driven world
Kimball underlined that the next big transformation is the sheer demand created by AI agents. “All of the activity that databases have had to deal with up till now has been humans. Now it’s going to be agents… You could have a trillion. And that’s going to happen.”
He explained that CockroachDB’s distributed design positions it to handle such explosive growth, which traditional databases might struggle to handle.
But scale is not just about growth; it is about efficiency as well. “Cockroach needs to become the most efficient and performant database at scale,” he said, adding that optimisation is underway.
Version 25.2 improved performance by 50%, and the long-term vision is to become “the cheapest database available at scale.”
For enterprises already straining under AI workloads, the promise of efficiency without compromising resilience is an attractive proposition.
Kimball also gave a glimpse into the architectural choices that enable such efficiency. He highlighted that CockroachDB uses data triplication instead of duplication, ensuring automatic self-healing in the event of failures.
While this is more expensive than traditional duplication, it prevents costly data loss and operational chaos.
“If that happens frequently, your teams burn out, your customers leave you, you get reputational brand damage, and the dollars and cents add up,” he warned, underscoring why resilience is worth the investment.
Competing, Collaborating, and Differentiating
Kimball acknowledged MongoDB as “a smart company” with a developer-friendly model but noted that CockroachDB rarely goes head-to-head with it.
“The team will typically know in advance whether they want a relational database or a document database,” he said.
He sees AI reshaping that dynamic, since rational, AI-driven decisions about architecture will favour capability over familiarity. Developers might have reservations about CockroachDB’s additional complexity, but AI tools are expected to render the adoption curve irrelevant in the long run, and may help developers realise the additional benefits they offer.
On partnerships, Kimball highlighted CockroachDB’s complicated, but fruitful relationship with AWS.
“In many ways, we think of AWS as our true north competitor. But they’re also one of our best partners,” he said.
In a $100 billion and growing operational database market, there is enough room to collaborate, compete, and still thrive. AWS itself sometimes may recommend CockroachDB to customers who need scale beyond Aurora or multi-cloud support, showing how competition and cooperation coexist.
Kimball also pointed to the broader market reality. “The hardest thing isn’t beating the competitor. It’s just trying to find a way to help the customer migrate, which is very difficult right now. But AI, I think, can substantially change those costs.”
Migration complexity remains a bottleneck, and Kimball believes AI will play a critical role in easing that process.
India As a Proving Ground
Discussing India, Kimball stressed that the market’s scale and regulatory environment align well with CockroachDB’s strengths.
He pointed to UPI and brokerage platforms as prime examples of workloads requiring resilience, compliance, and massive scalability.
“India actually does match up extraordinarily well with Cockroach’s differentiators. So that does help us command a premium price because we’re bringing such value.”
One example is Groww, one of India’s leading brokerage platforms, which relies on CockroachDB to manage enormous transaction volumes at scale. With only 5% market penetration so far, Kimball noted the growth opportunity is immense and a perfect match for CockroachDB’s distributed architecture.
He added that India’s financial sector, with rapid digitisation and strict regulatory oversight, creates strong demand for distributed systems that ensure regional survivability.
“Indian regulators are very concerned about the cloud provider risks. And that is also true in Europe. It’s not so true in the United States.” This makes CockroachDB’s ability to guarantee region survivability a natural fit for Indian enterprises.
Kimball noted CockroachDB’s commitment to Bengaluru as its APAC hub, and described India as an early, yet natural choice for enterprise-scale innovation.
“We’re very committed to Bangalore, despite the traffic situation,” he quipped, adding that the company is scaling operations and visibility across the region. Over the past three years, India has grown from an experiment to the anchor of their Asia-Pacific strategy.
The Age of Agentic AI
Looking ahead, CockroachDB is aligning itself with the rise of agent-based systems. Kimball emphasised CockroachDB’s decisive move towards becoming the optimal solution for agentic AI in the enterprise, highlighting features like multi-tenancy, bring-your-own-cloud, and Kubernetes operator for enterprise flexibility and control.
Kimball also discussed how developers at CockroachDB are adapting to the AI-driven pace of change.
While workloads have intensified, AI itself has become a productivity multiplier.
He emphasised that the best engineers are those who learn to “manage AI” as a resource, turning it into a career-defining capability.
As Kimball summed up, the database wars will not be won on features alone but on efficiency, resilience, and cost-effectiveness at unprecedented scale.
CockroachDB is betting on a future where distributed systems are not a luxury but a necessity, as billions of humans and trillions of agents demand reliable data infrastructure.
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