Most databases are designed for success cases. Real systems fail– the difference is whether they’re built and tested for it. <br /><br />In this episode, David sits down with Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, to explore the architectural and testing decisions behind CockroachDB, and why validating systems under worst-case conditions is essential to building reliable infrastructure at scale. Spencer shares the origin story of CockroachDB, tracing it back to his time at Google, where working on large-scale data systems and helping build Google Spanner exposed the limitations of existing database technologies. Motivated by the limits of existing database designs, Spencer and his co-founders left Google to build a resilient, scalable, open-source database designed for a world where failure isn’t an edge case, it’s the norm.<br /><br />Plus, Spencer and David discuss how emerging AI workloads are reshaping expectations for database infrastructure by increasing scale, stressing latency budgets, and raising the cost of failure.<br /><br />Join us as we discuss:<br /><ul><li>How Google Spanner inspired the creation of CockroachDB</li><li>Designing a database that assumed failure by default </li><li>What resilience means at massive scale</li><li>How AI is changing the demands placed on modern databases</li><li>How the Cockroach Labs–IBM partnership reflects a broader shift in enterprise modernization </li><li>Spencer’s futuristic vision for databases, from AI automation to outer space</li></ul>