Blog
Product
What is the CockroachDB Cloud API and why should you use It?
In this post you’ll learn about the CockroachDB Cloud API and how I’ve used it to create an application Dashboard with Next.js. Using the API you can build a custom interface to meet your organization’s needs, or perform various tasks relating to your database infrastructure. I’ll also explain how I’ve used NextAuth.js to create conditional authorization rules to facilitate greater control over the functionality. You can get a feel for what I’ve built using the links below. 🚀 Preview: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/demos/demo-cloud-api/ ⚙️ GitHub: https://github.com/cockroachdb/demo-cloud-api/
Paul Scanlon
April 5, 2023
System
How to calculate your true database costs
Before the dominance of the cloud, calculating the cost of a database was a pretty simple equation: software costs + hardware costs = database costs. If you chose an open source product, the software cost might melt away. While the cloud has fundamentally changed how we consume and deploy software, too many people are still using this outdated calculation. The truth is, there are a lot more things to consider when pricing out the total cost of a database. The hardware and software costs are still there, but you also need to think about the price of scaling the database, of integrating with your existing and future systems, and of planned–or unplanned–downtime.
Dan Kelly
April 4, 2023
System
How to make backups faster and more cost-effective with Wasabi
Database practitioners are always in pursuit of new ways to streamline operating costs. The total cost of database ownership can be broken down essentially into the license cost, the storage cost, and the compute cost. There are dozens of other soft and hard costs that are well worth considering and are covered in depth in this cost of ownership report, but the focus in this blog is the reduction of storage costs.
Alex Entin
March 31, 2023
Engineering
An epic read on follower reads
In this post we’re going to talk about one of the techniques that can be used in CockroachDB for getting good performance from databases accessed from multiple geographical regions: follower reads. These are operations presenting a slightly stale view of data, which can be served with local latencies from different regions.
Andrei Matei
March 29, 2023
Engineering
A brief history of high availability
I once went to a website that had “hours of operation,” and was only “open” when its brick and mortar counterpart had its lights on. I felt perplexed and a little frustrated; computers are capable of running all day every day, so why shouldn’t they? I’d been habituated to the internet’s incredible availability guarantees. However, before the internet, 24/7 high availability wasn’t “a thing.” Availability was desirable, but not something to which we felt fundamentally entitled. We used computers only when we needed them; they weren’t waiting idly by on the off-chance a request came by. As the internet grew, those previously uncommon requests at 3am local time became prime business hours partway across the globe, and making sure that a computer could facilitate the request was important.
Jessica Edwards
March 23, 2023
Company
CockroachDB powers the Fortune 50; expands to India & hires new President & CRO
At Cockroach Labs, the past year has been filled with some extraordinary transformations. Today I’m pleased to mark another milestone, as we showcase our business acceleration and expansion, customer growth, and a new addition to our executive team. We started this company as a small team frustrated with the lack of sophisticated database technology in the open source ecosystem. Since then, CockroachDB has helped some of the world’s best companies power their mission-critical workloads with a level of sophistication worthy of the promise of the global cloud. It has been exhilarating to see CockroachDB evolve into a product adopted by innovators in the Fortune 500.
Spencer Kimball
March 22, 2023
Product
Why Fortune 50 banks are leaving traditional RDBMS for CockroachDB
In the world of finance, changing databases is usually pretty rare. When you’re in charge of other people’s money — several trillion dollars of it, in the case of one of the banks discussed in this article — even small changes could represent major risks. That’s why even today, many banks still run systems based on legacy relational databases such as Oracle, IBM, and PostgreSQL — often the same databases they were using 10 or even 20 years ago.
Charlie Custer
March 21, 2023
Product
What is fault tolerance, and how to build fault-tolerant systems
November 25, 2020. If you work in tech infrastructure, that’s a date you probably remember. On that day, AWS’s US-east-1 experienced a significant outage, and it broke a pretty significant percentage of the internet. Adobe, League of Legends, Roku, Sirius XM, Amazon, Flickr, Giphy, and many, many more experienced issues or went offline completely as a result of the outage.
Charlie Custer
March 14, 2023
How to reduce costs, improve uptime, and increase developer speed with distributed SQL
Modern businesses run on data. Storing, organizing, managing, and accessing the increasingly complex and large volumes of data required to operate any business at scale accounts for a big chunk — 20% — of all IT infrastructure spending.
Charlie Custer
March 9, 2023