Blog
Accidentally multi-cloud: Mergers, acquisitions, and deployments
In this article, we share some key considerations for a technology leader involved in an M&A process and discuss the benefits of choosing flexible, cloud-agnostic technologies.
Domenic Ravita
October 20, 2023
Product
RoachFest23 Recap: DoorDash, City Storage Systems, Booking.com, Santander, and more shared their CockroachDB journeys
More than 500 attendees from around the globe recently swarmed into New York for RoachFest23, the annual user conference for CockroachDB customers. The two day event featured thirty speakers from some of the world’s leading enterprise companies including engineering leads and directors at Santander, DoorDash, City Storage Systems (also known as Cloud Kitchens), Booking.com, Fortinet, and many more. The Cockroach Labs co-founders also led sessions, shared the future of CockroachDB, and released new features and capabilities now available in CockroachDB.
Michelle Gienow
October 19, 2023
Product
High CPU usage in Postgres: how to detect it, and how to fix it
High CPU usage can bring your database – and with it, your application – grinding to a halt. This is, unfortunately, a fairly common problem. But it also can be a relatively easy fix. Let’s take a look at how to check CPU usage in Postgres, and how to troubleshoot for some of the most common causes of high CPU usage.
Charlie Custer
October 16, 2023
Design
What is multi-region architecture? The key to high availability & risk mitigation
Nearly every business has tier 0 applications that are critical for delivering their services to customers: these are the applications that make the money. Any disruption or downtime can result in significant financial losses and damage to a company’s reputation. Adopting multi-region application architecture mitigates these risks and ensures high availability. In this blog post, we will explore the concept of multi-region application architecture and discuss how it helps in risk mitigation while providing high availability.
Michelle Gienow
October 11, 2023
Product
What is a distributed database and how do they work?
The cloud is, by definition, a distributed system. Distributed application architecture is mainstream in the world of software — you wouldn’t build any other way. For more than a decade, though, the database has lagged behind. The architecture of traditional relational databases frequently conflicts with the architectural needs of modern cloud applications: horizontal scale, elasticity, and microservices.
Charlie Custer
October 9, 2023
Product
Multi-region architecture for new market expansion
When people talk about multi-region architecture, it’s often in the context of operational resilience. And that’s certainly a valid use case in a world where cloud region failures aren’t uncommon. But resilience is not the only reason to consider multi-region architecture. Fast-growing companies should also consider the virtues of multi-cloud deployments for market expansion.
Charlie Custer
October 5, 2023
Product
CockroachDB on Azure, multi-region serverless SQL, and more announced at RoachFest '23
Each October, RoachFest gathers together application owners, architects, engineers, and operators running their data-intensive workloads on CockroachDB (along with other innovators who are exploring doing the same). This conference centers on our users: attendees share their work, meet their peers, and learn first-hand from the builders behind the database. They’re also the first to hear about our latest product and feature releases, and the new capabilities they unlock for users.
Andrew Marshall
October 4, 2023
Engineering
Raft is so fetch: The Raft Consensus Algorithm explained through "Mean Girls"
Raft is a consensus algorithm used in distributed systems to ensure that data is replicated safely and consistently. That sentence alone can be confusing. Hopefully the analogy in this post can help people understand how it works. In honor of national Mean Girls day (“on October 3rd he asked me what day it was”), I present the Raft Consensus Algorithm as explained through the movie Mean Girls. (For a great, more technical overview of Raft, we recommend The Secret Lives of Data).
Mikael Austin
October 3, 2023
Product
SQL DROP COLUMN and ADD COLUMN: adding and removing columns in SQL
In this article, we’ll take a look at how to safely add and drop columns from a SQL database using ALTER TABLE … ADD and ALTER TABLE … DROP COLUMN. We will also briefly touch on adding and dropping constraints on SQL tables, since that functions in the same way and since it’s important to consider constraints anyway when you’re adding columns to a table.
Charlie Custer
October 2, 2023