Temporary tables in cockroach exist, but the implementation was done largely to fulfill compatibility rather than for serious use. The implementation effective

Temporary tables in cockroach exist, but the implementation was done largely to fulfill compatibility rather than for serious use. The implementation effectively just creates real tables that get cleaned up; they have all the same durability and distributed state despite not being accessible outside of the current session. Getting something done here turned out to be a big deal in order to get ORM and driver tests to run, which is extremely high value. A better implementation would just store the data locally and not involve any of the distributed infrastructure. If we did that, then temp tables wouldn't run into the other schema scalability bottlenecks I'm raising above.