The term NewSQL was coined in 2011 by 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett.
Wikipedia defines the term below:
Deep Dive: NewSQL Databases
Parallel Commits: An Atomic Commit Protocol for Distributed Transactions
Distributed ACID transactions form the beating heart of CockroachDB. They allow users to manipulate all of their data transactionally, no matter where it physically resides.
They're so important to CockroachDB’s goal to “Make Data Easy” that we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make them as fast as possible. Specifically, CockroachDB specializes in globally distributed deployments, so we put a lot of effort into optimizing CockroachDB’s transaction protocol for clusters with high inter-node latencies.