Regional tables work well when your application requires low-latency reads and writes for an entire table from a single region.
For regional tables, access to the table will be fast in the table's "home region" and slower in other regions. In other words, CockroachDB optimizes access to data in regional tables from a single region. By default, a regional table's home region is the database's primary region, but that can be changed to use any region added to the database.
For instructions showing how to set a table's locality to REGIONAL BY TABLE, see ALTER TABLE ... SET LOCALITY
{{site.data.alerts.callout_info}} By default, all tables in a multi-region database are regional tables that use the database's primary region. Unless you know your application needs different performance characteristics than regional tables provide, there is no need to change this setting. {{site.data.alerts.end}}