Extending SQL Server with CockroachDB: Global Scale Without Rewriting T-SQL

Many SQL Server environments support mission-critical applications that rely heavily on T-SQL, stored procedures, and long-established patterns. While teams increasingly need global availability, resilience, and elastic scale, full migrations to new platforms often take years and introduce significant risk.

This session presents a practical, phased approach for extending SQL Server workloads to CockroachDB as the target distributed database, without forcing an immediate rewrite of existing T-SQL application code. By using a translation layer such as Liberatii, organizations can preserve complex T-SQL logic while progressively running workloads on CockroachDB’s PostgreSQL-compatible, globally distributed architecture.

Rather than positioning modernization as a replacement exercise, this talk focuses on coexistence and controlled migration, where SQL Server remains in place for critical systems while teams gradually adopt CockroachDB for new, less-critical, or geographically distributed workloads. The result is faster time to value, lower risk, and a clear path to always-on, multi-region architectures.

A clear understanding of when and why CockroachDB is a strong target platform for SQL Server workloads Practical patterns for phased migration from SQL Server to CockroachDB using Liberatii Architectural insight into building globally distributed, always-on applications without rewriting existing systems