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Managing all infrastructure as code is a way of ensuring that no configuration drift occurs and that performance is as expected. This is critical when you’re managing applications at scale where the impact of configuration drift is exponential. In this tutorial blog we’ll demonstrate how CockroachDB Dedicated (our DBaaS) can be managed as code via our integration with Terraform. With this integration you are able to integrate your database with the other elements of the software stack you are deploying. And then you can use pipeline tools to deploy your application as a complete stack including the database.

It would be wrong to begin a comparison blog post about PostgreSQL without 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 30 years. In this post, we simply unpack some of the architectural differences between PostgreSQL and CockroachDB. In the process we’ll point out where the limitations of single server, single instance architecture might pose challenges for modern cloud infrastructure.

Jim Walker

July 12, 2023

When it comes to choosing a database, deployment, and configuration for your most critical workloads, you’ve got plenty of options. But how can you strike the right balance between performance, resilience, and cost? Let’s take a closer look at the important factors to assess when making these decisions.

Charlie Custer

July 12, 2023

Many software systems use a batch-driven process to operate. They accumulate data in a database and periodically a job will process the data to produce some result. In the past, this was sufficient. However, modern systems need to respond faster. They may not be able to wait for a batch to start. Many systems have turned to an Event-Driven approach because it is capable of reacting to events as they happen. However, despite the power of these systems, they do introduce new challenges.

At Cockroach Labs, we’ve spent a lot of time getting our SQL semantics to match PostgreSQL as much as possible - all so that you can use the awesome PostgreSQL language with a powerful, distributed backend like! Getting this right involves getting the Time, TimeTZ, Timestamp and TimestampTZ types right - which has proven quite the quest! Numerous bugs have been filed and fixed - and with it, our mastery of these types in PostgreSQL (and the Go time library) has increased! In this blog post, we’ll explore some intricacies we’ve found with these data types in PostgreSQL, and look at how we reproduce some of these features using Go and its ecosystem. We’ll share our recommendations for using these types along the way.

The first idea for a mainframe was developed by a Harvard researcher who took the concept to IBM in the 1930s. After a decade or so of development, the 5 ton machine – that filled an entire room and would cost around $3M today to build – was ready to use in 1943. Industries such as banking, retail, insurance, utilities, healthcare, and government still rely on their mainframes to handle their most sensitive, large-scale transactional data. Mainframes excel when it comes to security and reliability which is why many organizations trust them with their mission-critical workloads.

Cassie McAllister

July 6, 2023

Companies move to the cloud to take advantage of a wide variety of benefits, but building your infrastructure on a public cloud also comes with risks. Chief among them is vendor lock-in and the fear of being at a single cloud provider’s mercy, locked in behind what would be the months or years of work necessary to switch to a different cloud. But operating across multiple clouds at the same time is technically difficult and often prohibitively expensive. Many companies have embraced a different way of mitigating the lock-in risk: cloud portability.

Charlie Custer

July 5, 2023

We have officially started our expansion in India, marking a significant milestone in our global growth strategy. The move to India reflects our continued recognition of global talent and the country’s immense strategic potential to position our distributed SQL database to be used across the world.

Spencer Kimball

June 30, 2023

When working with a database, it’s common practice to use some kind of id field to provide a unique identifier for each row in a table. Imagine, for example, a customers table. We wouldn’t want to use fields such as name or address as unique identifiers because it’s possible more than one customer could have the same name, or share the same address, or in some cases even both! Instead, it’s a good idea to assign each row some kind of truly unique identifier. One option we have is to use a UUID.

Charlie Custer

June 29, 2023