The CREATE DATABASE statement creates a new CockroachDB database.
The CREATE DATABASE statement performs a schema change. For more information about how online schema changes work in CockroachDB, see Online Schema Changes.
Required privileges
To create a database, the user must be a member of the admin role or must have the CREATEDB parameter set.
Synopsis
Parameters
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
IF NOT EXISTS |
Create a new database only if a database of the same name does not already exist; if one does exist, do not return an error. |
name |
The name of the database to create, which must be unique and follow these identifier rules. |
encoding |
The CREATE DATABASE statement accepts an optional ENCODING clause for compatibility with PostgreSQL, but UTF-8 is the only supported encoding. The aliases UTF8 and UNICODE are also accepted. Values should be enclosed in single quotes and are case-insensitive.Example: CREATE DATABASE bank ENCODING = 'UTF-8'. |
CONNECTION LIMIT |
Supported for compatibility with PostgreSQL. A value of -1 indicates no connection limit. Values other than -1 are currently not supported. By default, CONNECTION LIMIT = -1. (*) |
PRIMARY REGION region_name |
Create a multi-region database with region_name as the primary region.Allowed values include any region returned by SHOW REGIONS FROM CLUSTER. |
REGIONS region_name_list |
Create a multi-region database with region_name_list as database regions.Allowed values include any region returned by SHOW REGIONS FROM CLUSTER.To set database regions at database creation, a primary region must be specified in the same CREATE DATABASE statement. |
SURVIVE ZONE FAILURE (Default)SURVIVE REGION FAILURE |
Create a multi-region database with regional failure or zone failure survival goals. To set the regional failure survival goal, the database must have at least 3 database regions. Surviving zone failures is the default setting for multi-region databases. |
*
To control the maximum number of non-superuser (root user or other admin role) connections a gateway node can have open at one time, use the server.max_connections_per_gateway cluster setting. If a new non-superuser connection would exceed this limit, the error message "sorry, too many clients already" is returned, along with error code 53300.
This setting may be useful until the CONNECTION LIMIT syntax is fully supported.
Example
Create a database
> CREATE DATABASE bank;
CREATE DATABASE
> SHOW DATABASES;
database_name | owner | primary_region | regions | survival_goal
----------------+-------+----------------+---------+----------------
bank | demo | NULL | {} | NULL
defaultdb | root | NULL | {} | NULL
postgres | root | NULL | {} | NULL
system | node | NULL | {} | NULL
(4 rows)
Create fails (name already in use)
> CREATE DATABASE bank;
ERROR: database "bank" already exists
SQLSTATE: 42P04
> CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS bank;
CREATE DATABASE
SQL does not generate an error, but instead responds CREATE DATABASE even though a new database wasn't created.
> SHOW DATABASES;
database_name | owner | primary_region | regions | survival_goal
----------------+-------+----------------+---------+----------------
bank | demo | NULL | {} | NULL
defaultdb | root | NULL | {} | NULL
postgres | root | NULL | {} | NULL
system | node | NULL | {} | NULL
(4 rows)
Create a multi-region database
This is an enterprise-only feature. You can use free trial credits to try it out.
Suppose you start a cluster with region and zone localities specified at startup.
For this example, let's use a demo cluster, with the --demo-locality flag to simulate a multi-region cluster:
cockroach demo --nodes=6 --demo-locality=region=us-east1,zone=us-east1-a:region=us-east1,zone=us-east1-b:region=us-central1,zone=us-central1-a:region=us-central1,zone=us-central1-b:region=us-west1,zone=us-west1-a:region=us-west1,zone=us-west1-b --no-example-database
> SHOW REGIONS;
region | zones | database_names | primary_region_of
--------------+-------------------------------+----------------+--------------------
us-central1 | {us-central1-a,us-central1-b} | {} | {}
us-east1 | {us-east1-a,us-east1-b} | {} | {}
us-west1 | {us-west1-a,us-west1-b} | {} | {}
(3 rows)
If regions are set at cluster start-up, you can create multi-region databases in the cluster that use the cluster regions.
Use the following command to specify regions and survival goals at database creation:
> CREATE DATABASE bank PRIMARY REGION "us-east1" REGIONS "us-east1", "us-central1", "us-west1" SURVIVE REGION FAILURE;
> SHOW DATABASES;
database_name | owner | primary_region | regions | survival_goal
----------------+-------+----------------+---------------------------------+----------------
bank | demo | us-east1 | {us-central1,us-east1,us-west1} | region
defaultdb | root | NULL | {} | NULL
postgres | root | NULL | {} | NULL
system | node | NULL | {} | NULL
(4 rows)
> SHOW REGIONS FROM DATABASE bank;
database | region | primary | zones
-----------+-------------+---------+--------------------------------
bank | us-east1 | true | {us-east1-a,us-east1-b}
bank | us-central1 | false | {us-central1-a,us-central1-b}
bank | us-west1 | false | {us-west1-a,us-west1-b}
(3 rows)
Create a multi-region database with a secondary region
This is an enterprise-only feature. You can use free trial credits to try it out.
You can add a secondary region to a multi-region database for failover purposes. If the primary region fails, the secondary region becomes the new primary region.
To add a secondary region during database creation, use the following steps:
Start a
cockroach democluster as described in the example Create a multi-region database.Issue a
CREATE DATABASEstatement like the following. It is the same as in the Create a multi-region database example, except that it adds aSECONDARY REGION {region}clause:
CREATE DATABASE bank PRIMARY REGION "us-east1" REGIONS "us-east1", "us-central1", "us-west1" SURVIVE REGION FAILURE SECONDARY REGION "us-west1";
CREATE DATABASE
For more information about secondary regions, see Secondary regions.
