Cockroach Releases 25.2 with Vector Indexing and Major Performance Gains

Delivers >41% performance gains, vector indexing for AI, enhanced security, and compliance-ready features for multi-cloud scale.

NEW YORK, June 4, 2025 — Cockroach Labs, a pioneer in cloud-native distributed SQL databases, announced CockroachDB 25.2, a milestone release marking a decade of transformative innovation. This latest version enhances CockroachDB’s strengths: performance, flexibility, and security to help businesses scale with confidence in an increasingly AI-driven, multi-cloud world.

As organizations modernize their infrastructure for an AI-driven, multi-cloud future, they must also address growing pressure to reduce costs, ensure uptime, and comply with evolving regulatory standards. According to the company’s State of Resilience 2025 report, 93% of technology leaders cite concerns over the financial impact of outages, with average annual losses exceeding $222,000.

At the same time, 79% report they are not yet prepared to meet new regulations such as DORA and NIS2. CockroachDB 25.2 addresses these challenges with significant improvements in scalability, performance, and security—enabling enterprises to modernize with confidence and scale globally without compromising availability or compliance.

To further validate this resilience, Cockroach Labs introduced the Performance Under Adversity benchmark. Unlike traditional tests conducted in ideal conditions, this benchmark simulates real-world failure scenarios—including disk stalls, node crashes, regional outages, and more—and demonstrates CockroachDB’s ability to deliver consistent throughput and sub-second latency under adverse conditions.

AI-Ready with Vector Indexing: Empowering the Future of AI and Machine Learning

As AI reshapes industries, the need for high-performance, scalable databases has surged. CockroachDB 25.2 addresses this with vector indexing, enabling faster, more accurate searches across large datasets. This allows businesses to seamlessly integrate AI models, accelerate data processing, and enhance real-time decision-making—while leveraging CockroachDB’s resilient, distributed architecture.

As organizations increasingly rely on AI for efficiency and innovation, vector indexing helps manage and query complex data sets at scale while keeping the index fresh and without degrading search results, making CockroachDB a go-to solution for next-gen AI workloads across sectors like healthcare and finance.

Performance Gains: 41% Improvement in Efficiency—Scaling with Lower Costs

CockroachDB now delivers greater throughput with fewer resources—reducing total cost of ownership while accelerating performance. 25.2 introduces two major optimizations that improve efficiency by 41%, enabling businesses to scale more effectively with less hardware.

• Generic Query Plans: Reuses precompiled plans to lower CPU overhead and speed up query execution—ideal for high-throughput workloads at scale.
• Buffered Writes: Optimizes write operations to increase throughput, reduce latency, and cut hardware costs without impacting transactional integrity.

These aren’t just performance enhancements—they offer a strategic advantage, helping organizations scale efficiently without increasing infrastructure spend.

This level of scalability is crucial for organizations that need to support global applications, from e-commerce platforms serving millions of users to enterprise systems managing vast amounts of data. As companies increasingly operate in multiple regions, they need a database that can provide resilience, consistency, and high availability across all locations. CockroachDB’s ability to handle such massive workloads with seamless performance enables businesses to confidently expand, manage large-scale operations, and maintain reliability as they grow.

Whether scaling to support millions of customers or expanding into new regions, CockroachDB 25.2 offers the reliability and performance needed for businesses to thrive in a fast-paced, global digital economy.

“CockroachDB 25.2 delivers the performance, scalability, and security features that organizations need to stay ahead in today’s competitive, cloud-driven world,” said Peter Mattis, CTO and Chief Product Officer at Cockroach Labs. “With this release, we’re not only meeting the challenges of modern infrastructure but also paving the way for businesses to innovate with AI, scale globally, and ensure the security and compliance of their data.”

Additional Innovations in CockroachDB 25.2:

• Enhanced Security: Includes row-level security and configurable cipher suites for stronger FIPS compliance and control.
• Fast Restore: 4x faster restore from backup in certain use cases.
• Cloud Plan Flexibility: Easily switch between Basic, Standard, and Advanced plans to align with evolving workload needs.
• Physical Cluster Replication (PCR) is now GA: Delivers low RPO/RTO for two-datacenter setups, enabling robust disaster recovery.

For more information on CockroachDB 25.2, visit https://www.cockroachlabs.com/whatsnew/

About Cockroach Labs

Cockroach Labs is a pioneering software company at the forefront of database technology, dedicated to delivering resilient and scalable database solutions to run mission-critical workloads for the world’s most important businesses. The company’s clients include Bose, Form3, Hard Rock Digital, Shipt, Fortune 50 global financial institutions, as well as retail and media industry leaders. With a mission to scale when others fail, Cockroach Labs is revolutionizing the way businesses manage their data with its innovative cloud-native distributed SQL database, CockroachDB.

Source: Cockroach Labs, Inc.