The company decided to remove direct access to their transactional key-value store and force interactions through the SQL layer. From this comment in the FAQ,

The company decided to remove direct access to their transactional key-value store and force interactions through the SQL layer. From this comment in the FAQ, it looks like the overhead for some mutations is small: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-questions.html#can-i-use-cockroachdb-as-a-key-value-store https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-question... Do range queries on a simple table also translate to underlying key-value range queries with minimal overhead?