CockroachDB 26.4: One major upgrade a year with skip-level upgrades, run active-active across two data centers, and encrypt for the post-quantum era

CockroachDB 26.4 introduces features aimed at reducing operational overhead for teams running payment, ledger, and other critical workloads. It enables annual skip-level upgrades from one .4 release to the next, expands support for active-active two-data-center deployments through transactional logical replication, and improves recovery with read-available online restores, encrypted backup support, and recovery-point monitoring. Security additions include passwordless OIDC login, workload identities mapped to SQL users, optional root-login disablement, table-level audit logging, post-quantum TLS, stronger credential redaction, and explicit privileges for external storage access. Observability enhancements provide persistent statement, transaction, and contention insights, complete SQL CPU measurements, richer session history, regional metrics, and stable SQL views for operational queries, while Resource Manager can reserve minimum CPU capacity for critical workloads. Other updates include lower-cost TTL processing, locality-aware imports, Avro changefeed support for read-only schema registries, a preview node-to-node RPC framework, and expanded PostgreSQL compatibility such as temporary-table behavior, statement-level triggers, transition tables, enhanced RETURNING support, and additional SQL features. Version 26.4 is rolling out to selected CockroachDB Cloud clusters, with self-hosted binaries expected shortly afterward, and upgrades require moving through version 26.2 and reviewing tightened security defaults.

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