Benchmarking Transaction Patterns

Guides users through benchmarking, explaining, and comparing two formulations of the same transactional business workflow in CockroachDB: explicit multi-statement transactions versus single-statement CTE transactions. Focuses on performance under contention, fair test methodology, and result interpretation.

Complement to design skills: For general transaction design principles, see designing-application-transactions. For SQL syntax and query patterns, see cockroachdb-sql.

When to Use This Skill

• Comparing explicit multi-statement transactions versus CTE-based single-statement transactions
• Benchmarking CockroachDB workloads under high concurrency or hot-key contention
• Investigating retry pressure, p95/p99 latency, or throughput differences between transaction formulations
• Deciding whether to rewrite a multi-step application flow into a single SQL statement
• Setting up a fair side-by-side benchmark with proper reset discipline
• Interpreting benchmark results (throughput, retries, tail latency, failures)
• Explaining why SQL Activity still shows waiting even with CTE transactions

Prerequisites

• CockroachDB test cluster (do not benchmark on production)