Migrate to CockroachDB with a certified partner.

Distributed SQL solves the resilience problem your legacy database could not. It does not solve the operational one, and it introduces new failure modes that a single-node estate never had. Maxima converts the schema, rebuilds the ETL, rehearses the cutover, and then runs the cluster 24/7 inside your own account.

Get your CockroachDB migration and operations assessment

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Operating for complex industries since 1993

Why teams are moving to distributed SQL

The specialist pool is shrinking faster than the estate is.

The engineers who understood the quirks of a fifteen-year-old Oracle or Sybase schema have retired or moved on. CockroachDB is built on the PostgreSQL wire protocol, which means the skills gap that made the legacy system risky to touch does not reappear on the other side of the migration.

Licensing is priced against headroom, not value.

Per-core and per-instance licensing punishes exactly the spare capacity a reliability-conscious team wants to keep. The more resilient you make a legacy estate, the more it costs you to own.

Single-node failover is a person, not a system.

A zone outage on a traditional estate is a 3am page and a runbook. Data in CockroachDB is replicated across nodes by default, and node or zone loss does not require a human to start the failover. That is the architectural reason teams move. It is not the reason migrations succeed.

What can go wrong when you migrate to CockroachDB

Wire compatibility is not behavioral compatibility. 
Your ETL has no target. 
Sequential primary keys become write hotspots. 
The application has no retry handling. 
Sybase and older proprietary engines are outside the documented tooling. 

How we approach it: Five phases, one accountable team

Phase 0: Assessment and conversion report.

A read-only pass over the real schema. Every object classified: converts automatically, needs a manual rewrite, or has no equivalent and needs an application decision. Stored procedures, triggers, scheduled jobs, and ETL packages inventoried and estimated separately from the tables. 

Phase 1: Target design.

Cluster topology and survival goals, region placement against your latency and data-residency obligations, primary key and index design that does not inherit the legacy hotspot pattern, and the deployment landing zone inside your own cloud account. Nothing migrates until the destination is real.

Phase 2: Schema conversion and pipeline rebuild.

Schema converted and reviewed object by object, with every conversion decision logged. ETL packages and scheduled jobs rebuilt as orchestrated pipelines. Application retry handling added where SERIALIZABLE isolation requires it. Automated regression suites generated from the legacy code so the target's behavior is tested against the source's, not against a specification nobody wrote down. 

Phase 3: Rehearsed cutover.

Initial bulk load, then continuous replication from the source while both systems run in parallel. Row-level verification of table structure, column definitions, and data before traffic moves. Traffic stopped, consistency verified, failback enabled, then cutover. The legacy system stays intact and the failback path stays open until the new environment has proven itself.

Phase 4: Day-2 operations.

24/7 monitoring and incident response, schema evolution and index maintenance, performance tuning against agreed latency baselines, backup and disaster recovery, certificate and secret management, and cost governance so the savings do not erode in month six. All managed with the help of 35+ specialized AI management agents.

Stop splitting your database strategy between a migration vendor and an internal operations team. One accountable partner for the whole lifecycle, operating inside your infrastructure. 

Get your CockroachDB migration and operations assessment

Single-region OLTP with no resilience requirement the current engine is failing to meet. Distributed SQL solves a problem you may not have.

Heavy analytical workloads that belong in a warehouse rather than in the operational database, whichever engine it runs on.

Schemas whose entire logic lives in procedural code, where the rewrite cost exceeds the value of the move and the honest answer is to modernize the application first.

Anything depending on unsupported features (range types, foreign data wrappers, session-scoped advisory locks) where the application cannot be changed.

Anything scheduled for decommission inside twelve months, where the migration cost never pays back.

Not everything belongs on distributed SQL

An assessment that recommends moving everything is probably a sales pitch. Workloads we routinely advise leaving where they are:

Done in production, not in a lab

A North American insurance-services firm. Three applications moved off SQL Server.

  • 95 tables, 12 views, and 113 stored procedures converted
  • 13 to 15 SSIS packages rebuilt as Airflow pipelines
  • Every conversion decision captured in an audit log, which is what made human review of the converted objects tractable rather than open-ended
  • The result was handed over as a permanent estate-management suite their operations team still runs against today

Who this is for

You are running a legacy relational estate (Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, or an aging PostgreSQL or MySQL deployment) that has become expensive or risky to keep
Multi-region resilience or horizontal write scale is an actual requirement, not an aspiration
You have a database migration approved and no team free to execute it
You want the same organization accountable for the migration and for what happens at 3am afterward
You need the cluster to run inside your own account, under your own security boundary

Running a CockroachDB migration in-house versus with Maxima

Category

In-house

Maxima

Schema conversion

Object-by-object discovery as the project runs; scope grows

Full object classification done by certified CrDB experts

Procedural code and ETL

Procedural code and ETL

Procedural code and ETL

Cutover risk

First rehearsal is the production cutover

Parallel run, row-level verification, failback path open until proven

Day 2 coverage

The migration team disperses; operations inherit an unfamiliar system

Same accountable team runs it, 24/7/365, follow-the-sun, supported by 35+ specialized AI management agents

Exit

Knowledge leaves with the contractors

Exit Guarantee: we write the everything and you keep all of it

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Frequently Asked Questions

Which databases can be migrated to CockroachDB?
Cockroach Labs' Schema Conversion Tool supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server as source systems. Sybase and other older proprietary engines are outside that documented list and need a custom schema-conversion pass before the standard load, replicate, and verify pattern applies. Maxima scopes both paths in a Day 0 assessment.
Is CockroachDB really PostgreSQL compatible?
It uses the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so most existing drivers and most PostgreSQL syntax work against it largely unchanged. But compatibility at the interface is not identical behavior: integer division returns a decimal, float overflow returns Infinity rather than raising an error, bitwise operator precedence differs, and range types, XML functions, column-level privileges, and foreign data wrappers are not supported. Application behavior is validated against the target during migration rather than assumed.
What does not convert automatically?
Procedural logic is the main category. Stored procedures, triggers, and engine-specific scheduled jobs are rewritten rather than converted, and ETL packages such as SSIS have no target inside the database and get rebuilt as orchestrated pipelines. In practice, the stored-procedure count, not the data volume, determines the migration timeline.
Will our application code need to change?
Usually in two places. Under SERIALIZABLE isolation, CockroachDB retries contended transactions automatically where it can, and where it cannot it returns a transaction retry error the client must handle, so client-side retry logic is added if it does not already exist. Second, monotonically increasing INT or SERIAL primary keys create read and write hotspots in a distributed database, so key and index design is revisited during conversion rather than inherited from the legacy schema.
How long does a CockroachDB migration take?
The variable is procedural code, not data size. A schema of roughly a hundred tables with no stored procedures is a different engagement from the same schema with a hundred stored procedures and a dozen ETL packages behind it. The Day 0 assessment produces the object-by-object classification that makes an honest timeline possible, which is why we do not quote one before it.
Where does the cluster run, and who has access to our data?
The cluster runs in your cloud account, inside your security boundary. Your code stays in your repositories. There are no external forks and no shadow repos. Maxima operates the environment with named access under a RACI matrix and defined escalation paths.
Do you keep running it after the migration?
That is the model. Managed operations cover 24/7 monitoring and incident response, schema evolution, performance tuning against agreed latency baselines, backup and disaster recovery, and cost governance. The same team that migrated the estate operates it, which is the point.