A Reference Architecture for a Global Reporting Platform

This article outlines a practical approach to rethinking traditional reporting platforms by integrating reporting capabilities directly into a single operational database, using CockroachDB as a reference architecture. It addresses the limitations of traditional reporting systems, which often struggle with latency, inconsistency, and operational overhead, by proposing a setup where transactional ingest, data archiving, and reporting queries coexist without the need for separate systems. The architecture is structured to support different workloads by isolating them into regions with specific roles, hardware profiles, and access paths, allowing reporting to be decoupled from transactional processes without duplicating data. This setup involves the use of materialized views for pre-shaping data for reporting and employs a multi-version concurrency control model to ensure consistent and repeatable query results. Additionally, Change Data Capture (CDC) is used selectively as a boundary for data exiting the system, rather than for internal reporting processes. By embedding reporting functions within the database, the article suggests that reporting can become an integral operational property rather than a separate, complex pipeline, ultimately reducing complexity and improving data consistency and accessibility.