Cockroachdb Laravel Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Database selection for Laravel applications: whether to standardize on CockroachDB (distributed, Postgres-wire-compatible) versus PostgreSQL/MySQL for new or migrating services.
• Build vs buy: avoids building and maintaining an in-house connection/driver layer between Laravel's Eloquent/query builder and CockroachDB; the package supplies the driver, schema handling, and connection plumbing.
• Roadmap sequencing: v1.4.0 is effectively a gating dependency for the Laravel 11 upgrade for any team running CockroachDB. Teams on Laravel ≤10 should pin v1.3.0; teams targeting Laravel 11 must move to v1.4.0.
• Use cases this enables: multi-region active-active services, globally distributed SaaS, data-residency/geo-partitioning requirements, and workloads needing horizontal scale with serializable transactions.
• Risk decisions: a community-maintained driver for a production datastore. The assessment should drive a decision on support expectations, version-pinning policy, and fallback to Laravel's first-party pgsql driver if the package lags framework or CockroachDB releases.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt when:

• You are building on Laravel and have selected (or are seriously evaluating) CockroachDB as the primary datastore.
• You need Eloquent, the query builder, and migrations to work against CockroachDB rather than dropping to raw PDO/SQL.
• You are on Laravel 11 (v1.4.0) — or on Laravel 10 and below, pinning v1.3.0.
• Multi-region survivability, horizontal scalability, or Postgres compatibility are genuine product requirements.

Look elsewhere or proceed with caution when:

• You are on Laravel 12+ or any version outside the stated support matrix — confirm compatibility before committing.
• Your workload is single-region and moderate scale: first-party PostgreSQL with Laravel's pgsql driver is lower-risk and better supported.
• You depend heavily on CockroachDB-specific capabilities (geo-partitioning DDL, changefeeds, AS OF SYSTEM TIME) — verify driver coverage; expect raw SQL for the edges.
• You require vendor-backed SLAs; this is a community package, not Cockroach Labs-supported.
• The team lacks operational experience with distributed SQL (transaction retries, contention, hot ranges). The driver does not remove that operational burden.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

Executives: This release keeps our Laravel stack compatible with CockroachDB on Laravel 11, so we can stay on a supported framework version without abandoning our distributed-database strategy. It is a small, low-risk compatibility release — a framework version bump — but it is a gating dependency for the Laravel 11 upgrade wherever CockroachDB is in scope.

Engineering: v1.4.0 contains a single change — Laravel 11 support (PR #37). Treat it as a compatibility release, not a feature release. Confirm our Laravel version and pin accordingly (v1.4.0 for Laravel 11; v1.3.0 for Laravel ≤10). Before making it a hard dependency, run migrations plus a representative query workload against a staging CockroachDB cluster, check transaction-retry and schema-builder behavior, and assess the maintainer's release cadence against our framework upgrade timeline.