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Any enterprise-grade database needs to have a mature story when it comes to Backup and Recovery. Historically, due to architectural limitations, many relational database technologies relied heavily on backups in the event of a disaster (they use backups to recover data to a secondary location for Disaster Recovery). Technology has advanced over recent years, driven mainly by the hyper scalers. The introduction of Read Replica standby nodes, which are distributed over multiple locations and are ready to take over if the primary node fails, has increased the resilience of these solutions. These can be spread over multiple locations. In this blog, I’ll demonstrate how to do this with CockroachDB and Azure blob.

CockroachDB relies heavily on multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) to offer consistency guarantees. MVCC, by design, requires the database to keep multiple revisions of values. A buildup of these revisions can impact query execution costs for certain workloads. In this article, we introduce the idea of Protected Timestamps: a novel way for CockroachDB to efficiently retain only relevant revisions, while safely deleting (garbage collecting) old ones.

Bulk ingestions are used to write large amounts of data with high throughput, such as imports, backup restoration, schema changes, and index backfills. These operations use a separate write path that bypasses transaction processing, instead ingesting data directly into the storage engine with highly amortized write and replication costs. However, because these operations bypass regular transaction processing, they have also been able to sidestep our normal mechanisms for preserving MVCC history.

This is part 3 of a 3-part blog series about how we’ve improved the way CockroachDB stores and modifies data in bulk (here is part 1 and here is part II). We went way down into the deepest layers of our storage system, then up to our SQL schema changes and their transaction timestamps - all without anybody noticing (or at least we hope!)

This is part 1 of a 3-part blog series about how we’ve improved the way CockroachDB stores and modifies data in bulk. We went way down into the deepest layers of our storage system, then up to our SQL schema changes and their transaction timestamps - all without anybody noticing (or at least we hope!)

Built In today announced that Cockroach Labs won in six categories on its 2023 Best Places To Work Awards. We were recognized on all of the lists we were eligible and nominated for including: - New York City Best Midsize Places to Work - New York City Best Places to Work - San Francisco Best Midsize Places to Work - San Francisco Best Places to Work - U.S. Best Midsize Places to Work - U.S. Best Places to Work

Lindsay Grenawalt

January 11, 2023

When working with an OLTP database, customers’ data protection concerns manifest in different ways. Whether it is about the ability to encrypt data with one’s own keys, redacting cluster logs, field-level data masking or something else, we have partnered closely with our customers in providing more than what they were looking for. So, when we heard feedback that customers needed a way to obfuscate cloud resource credentials when running backup-restore or changefeed SQL commands, we decided to outdo that requirement. Backup-Restore and real-time changefeeds are two of the most critical capabilities in an OLTP database. The former applies to disaster recovery whereas the latter allows integration with analytics platforms or is sometimes used for replication.

In discussions of application architecture, the name Kafka comes up quite frequently. But if you haven’t worked with event-driven systems that rely on real-time data before, you might not be familiar with it.

Charlie Custer

December 22, 2022

In 2020, Hard Rock International (HRI) and Seminole Gaming (SGA) launched Hard Rock Digital and tasked that organization with developing an application for sports betting. Hard Rock Digital has the ability to leverage data from HRI and SGA’s combined database of more than 130 million customers and their ~250 land-based venue (across 76 countries); to build the application.

Cassie McAllister

December 21, 2022