CockroachDB is a Distributed SQL database. That means for the person doing the querying, everything looks like the SQL they've known for years. But under the hood, there's a lot more going on. In order to achieve the bulletproof resiliency and elastic scalability CockroachDB delivers, data is replicated and geographically distributed across nodes of a cluster, and read and write requests are automatically routed between nodes as appropriate. Replication and geo-distribution mean that your nodes have a shape--a topology--and how you design that topology allows you to make important tradeoffs regarding latency and resilience.
In a recent episode of The Cockroach Hour, database experts Tim Veil and Jim Walker met with Jesse Seldess, VP of Education at Cockroach Labs, to walk through why topology patterns matter in CockroachDB, and how to select the one that works best for your use case.