CockroachDB tutorial for beginners (insecure cluster)

Create/configure database

First, let's start a local cluster - follow step 1. and 2. from the docs.

Once you have it, create a database. Here I am going to create a database called example. Our user here is cockroach. We are not going to use a password, since it's not supported for insecure cluster.

cockroach sql --insecure --host=localhost:26257

CREATE DATABASE example;
CREATE USER IF NOT EXISTS cockroach;
GRANT ALL ON DATABASE example TO cockroach;

When using Migrate CLI we need to pass to database URL. Let's export it to a variable for convenience:

export COCKROACHDB_URL='cockroachdb://cockroach:@localhost:26257/example?sslmode=disable'

sslmode=disable means that the connection with our database will not be encrypted. This is needed to connect to an insecure node.

NOTE: Do not use COCKROACH_URL as a variable name here, it's already in use for discrete parameters and you may run into connection problems. For more info check out docs.

You can find further description of database URLs here.

Create migrations

Let's create a table called users:

migrate create -ext sql -dir db/migrations -seq create_users_table

If there were no errors, we should have two files available under db/migrations folder:

000001_create_users_table.down.sql
000001_create_users_table.up.sql

Note the sql extension that we provided.

In the .up.sql file let's create the table:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS example.users
(
   user_id INT PRIMARY KEY,
   username VARCHAR (50) UNIQUE NOT NULL,
   password VARCHAR (50) NOT NULL,
   email VARCHAR (300) UNIQUE NOT NULL
);

And in the .down.sql let's delete it:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS example.users;

By adding IF EXISTS/IF NOT EXISTS we are making migrations idempotent - you can read more about idempotency in getting started

Run migrations

migrate -database ${COCKROACHDB_URL} -path db/migrations up

Let's check if the table was created properly by running cockroach sql --insecure --host=localhost:26257 -e "show columns from example.users;". The output you are supposed to see:

  column_name |  data_type   | is_nullable | column_default | generation_expression |                   indices                    | is_hidden
+-------------+--------------+-------------+----------------+-----------------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------+
  user_id     | INT8         |    false    | NULL           |                       | {primary,users_username_key,users_email_key} |   false
  username    | VARCHAR(50)  |    false    | NULL           |                       | {users_username_key}                         |   false
  password    | VARCHAR(50)  |    false    | NULL           |                       | {}                                           |   false
  email       | VARCHAR(300) |    false    | NULL           |                       | {users_email_key}                            |   false
(4 rows)

Now let's check if running reverse migration also works:

migrate -database ${COCKROACHDB_URL} -path db/migrations down

Make sure to check if your database changed as expected in this case as well.

Database transactions

To show database transactions usage, let's create another set of migrations by running:

migrate create -ext sql -dir db/migrations -seq add_mood_to_users

Again, it should create for us two migrations files:

000002_add_mood_to_users.down.sql
000002_add_mood_to_users.up.sql

In Cockroach, when we want our queries to be done in a transaction, we need to wrap it with BEGIN and COMMIT commands, similar to PostgreSQL. In our example, we are going to add a column to our database that can only accept enumerable values or NULL. Migration up:

BEGIN;

ALTER TABLE example.users ADD COLUMN mood STRING;
ALTER TABLE example.users ADD CONSTRAINT check_mood CHECK (mood IN ('happy', 'sad', 'neutral'));

COMMIT;

Migration down:

ALTER TABLE example.users DROP COLUMN mood;

Now we can run our new migration and check the database:

migrate -database ${COCKROACHDB_URL} -path db/migrations up
cockroach sql --insecure --host=localhost:26257 -e "show columns from example.users;"

Expected output:

  column_name |  data_type   | is_nullable | column_default | generation_expression |                   indices                    | is_hidden  
+-------------+--------------+-------------+----------------+-----------------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------+
  user_id     | INT8         |    false    | NULL           |                       | {primary,users_username_key,users_email_key} |   false    
  username    | VARCHAR(50)  |    false    | NULL           |                       | {users_username_key}                         |   false    
  password    | VARCHAR(50)  |    false    | NULL           |                       | {}                                           |   false    
  email       | VARCHAR(300) |    false    | NULL           |                       | {users_email_key}                            |   false    
  mood        | STRING       |    true     | NULL           |                       | {}                                           |   false    
(5 rows)

Optional: Run migrations within your Go app

Here is a very simple app running migrations for the above configuration:

import (
	"log"

	"github.com/golang-migrate/migrate/v4"
	_ "github.com/golang-migrate/migrate/v4/database/cockroachdb"
	_ "github.com/golang-migrate/migrate/v4/source/file"
)

func main() {
	m, err := migrate.New(
		"file://db/migrations",
		"cockroachdb://cockroach:@localhost:26257/example?sslmode=disable")
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	if err := m.Up(); err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
}

You can find details here

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