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Scale & Resilience
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Data modernization has been a critical aspect of technological evolution throughout recent history – it has simply taken on different forms based on the economic, business, and societal needs at the time. In a recent episode of Big Ideas in App Architecture, two expert Cockroach Labs sales engineers – David Joy and Jim Hatcher – discussed data modernization’s intriguing evolution, highlighting key shifts and trends that are unfolding.
Becca Weng
January 14, 2025
data modernization
database modernization
Scale & Resilience
Preparing for the “New Normal”: How to Minimize the Impact of IT Outages
High-profile outages and performance constraints underscore the acute need for systems capable of adapting to the modern world. Take the recent Crowdstrike outage, which affected various industries, including finance, healthcare, and notably aviation: Thousands of flights were cancelled, and many hospitals worldwide had to cancel non-emergency procedures as they were unable to access patient data.
Becca Weng
January 13, 2025
SaaS
Reference Architecture
Building a real-world IAM system: centralized vs. distributed
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been locked out of your banking app, a hotel room, your work computer, your car, your Gmail… the list goes on. You know the reason your access was blocked was because you either forgot your keys/password or had the incorrect login credentials. Businesses of every kind implement identity and access management (IAM) systems for your protection, and their own. Failure to protect humans and resources can easily result in devastating consequences.
Cassie McAllister
January 8, 2025
Tutorials
Cockroach Labs Launches Instructor-Led Training Course: “CockroachDB Fundamentals for Application Development”
Cockroach Labs has announced the availability of our new instructor-led training course, “CockroachDB Fundamentals for Application Development.” This course is the first in a series of live educational offerings from Cockroach Labs, designed to ensure that organizations make the most of CockroachDB.
David Weiss
January 7, 2025
Product
Comparing CockroachDB and PostgreSQL
Before we begin a comparison blog post about PostgreSQL, we must first acknowledging that it is one of the most reliable and widely used databases in the history of software. The world owes a debt of gratitude to the open source community that has built and supported this important project for the last 35 years. In this post, we unpack some of the architectural differences between PostgreSQL and CockroachDB. We’ll point out where the limitations of single server, single instance architecture might pose challenges for modern cloud infrastructure, and how a distributed foundation can be a better solution for your apps and services.
Jim Walker
January 6, 2025
Generative AI
Scale & Resilience
2024: Resilience, AI, Distributed SQL, and Momentum
As we head into the new year, it’s the perfect time to look back on what was a big year for Cockroach Labs. 2024 has been memorable for us, in so many ways. Our company grew to over 500 employees; we moved both our Bangalore and Austin offices to larger spaces to accommodate our growth; we took our annual customer conference, RoachFest, global for the first time. We also celebrated the 50th episode of our podcast, Big Ideas in App Architecture, which has featured tech leaders from Cameo, Estée Lauder, DoorDash, Confluent, and more.
Becca Weng
December 30, 2024
Scale & Resilience
AWS
Aurora DSQL is in preview – A first comparison with CockroachDB
At AWS re:Invent 2024, AWS announced the latest edition to their database offerings: Aurora DSQL, which is now in Preview. The fact that AWS, a company with $100+ billion in ARR, is investing in distributed SQL, is further confirmation of what our founders and team have bet on for nearly a decade: distributed SQL solves a lot of business-critical problems, and it’s a solution that is here to stay. In short – competition is validation. While we’re thrilled that DSQL undoubtedly will drive more interest and choice in the area of distributed SQL databases, it is important to highlight some of the notable differences between DSQL and CockroachDB.
Ray Austin
December 27, 2024
Azure
Unlocking Enterprise Scale with CockroachDB: Operating CockroachDB on Microsoft Azure – Part 4
In part 4 of this series, we'll dive deeper into best practices for operating CockroachDB on Azure. We'll cover backups, compute and storage considerations, security, data locality, performance testing and survivability goals.
David Joy
December 20, 2024
Preparing for DORA Regulations: From Fundamentals to Vendor Selection
Technology leaders working in financial services will have likely already heard of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), particularly if they have any presence or operations in Europe. Many will have already gotten to work preparing for it alongside their legal and compliance teams.
Daniel Hegwood
December 18, 2024
SQL
Scale & Resilience
“PostgreSQL Compatible Databases”: A Tale of Two Approaches
It’s a tale of two approaches to turn PostgreSQL into a distributed SQL database solution: forking PostgreSQL or rewriting the SQL layer in a compatible way. This has resulted in a common talking point: If a vendor forks PostgreSQL are they inherently more PostgreSQL compatible?
David Bressler
December 17, 2024