Blog
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
Company
Cockroach Labs #1 large company on Crain’s 2023 Best Places to Work
We’re pleased to announce that Crain’s has ranked Cockroach Labs #1 in the large companies category of its 2023 Best Places to Work in New York City list. This is the fourth year in a row Cockroach Labs has received this ranking in the large category. The past year has been an evolution for Cockroach Labs. We grew in size, maturity, and knowledge. We welcomed our new President and CRO, Jason Forget and opened up our Austin office and India location. The strength and resilience of our community continue to be the bond that propels us forward.
Lindsay Grenawalt
September 28, 2023
applications
sqlfmt: A free online SQL formatter for writing prettier SQL
This post was originally published in 2018 by former CockroachDB engineer Matt Jibson, who owns goats and makes his own soap. It’s one of the most popular blogs we’ve ever published so we wanted to get it back up on the site for a new crop of blog readers.
Matt Jibson
September 27, 2023
Engineering
How to optimize garbage collection in Go
After publishing \\[a post about why we chose Go for CockroachDB](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/why-go-was-the-right-choice-for-cockroachdb/), we received questions about how we deal with some of Go’s known issues — especially those related to performance, garbage collection, and deadlocks.
Jessica Edwards
September 26, 2023