RoachFest London 2026: The database as competitive asset

The database a business depends on shouldn’t be a potential point of failure; it should be a competitive asset. That’s the proposition Cockroach Labs will put to enterprise architects and database administrators at Convene's Bishopsgate venue in London on Thursday, June 25, 2026. The one-day RoachFest London 2026 event will examine how a database makes that transition from costly liability to competitive advantage.

Modern infrastructure grows more complex and harder to manage by the year: Today's challenge might be a traffic spike or a cloud provider outage; tomorrow's could be an AI agent that needs durable context across long-running sessions.

At RoachFest London, Cockroach Labs will show why the database should not sit as a passive store, but act as the resilient layer that a modern enterprise depends on: one that lets teams operate without fear, build with confidence, and adapt to what's next.

What to expect

Tracks at RoachFest London 2026 cover:

• AI and agentic workloads

• Resiliency

• Migrations

• Operational efficiency

Hands-on workshops range from foundational distributed SQL through multi-region architecture to vector storage, indexing, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) built on ACID guarantees.

Databases in the age of AI

In the keynote, Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, will walk through why the database industry is at an inflection point, facing a complexity tax and the sprawl of hundreds of alternatives that enterprises are struggling to operate and modernize.

He'll connect those pain points to the wave of agentic AI that's creating data pressure the industry has never seen before, and make the case that distributed databases are no longer a luxury but an emerging requirement.

He will also discuss how CockroachDB is evolving to meet this moment by collapsing cost and scaling elastically. He’ll close with the vision that the database of the next decade will operate itself, with humans elevated to policy and judgment, not log files and escalations.

A separate panel session, led by Memori Labs co-founder Adam B. Struck, focuses on where long-term agent state should live and how to keep it consistent as conditions change.

Cloud-busting on purpose

Form3's vice president of engineering Kevin Holditch will walk attendees through a payments architecture that runs active/active/active across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Form3 takes disaster-recovery testing seriously enough to pull down a cloud provider for 24 hours in production, not staging.

What's next for CockroachDB

Cockroach Labs' vice president of product Igor Stanko will lay out the CockroachDB roadmap, including bring your own cloud, AI-powered migration tooling, and improvements to the database's price-performance ratio.

Operating without fear

The afternoon's featured guest knows high-stakes environments. In his session "Operating Without Fear", Major Tim Peake CMG, the first British astronaut to reach the International Space Station (ISS), draws a parallel between astronaut training and the discipline of building systems that thrive under adversity.

RoachFest London 2026 takes place at Convene Bishopsgate on June 25. Workshops open at 9am, main stage sessions begin at 1:05, capped off by an evening reception from 4:30 to 6:00.

Registration is free with promo code SP100 – register now as space is limited.

See the full agenda and register at cockroachlabs.com/roachfest/location/london.

Sponsored by Cockroach Labs.