CockroachDB engineer Alex Robinson will be presenting "The Whys and Hows of a Distributed SQL Database." In this talk, Alex will examine the history of databases to see how we got here, covering the motivations for this new class of systems and why developers should care about them. He will also take a deep dive into the key design choices behind one open source distributed SQL database, CockroachDB, that enable it to offer such properties and compare them to past SQL and NoSQL designs. He will look specifically at how to achieve the easy deployment and management of a scalable, self-healing, strongly-consistent database with techniques such as dynamic sharding and rebalancing, consensus protocols, lock-free transactions, and more.