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Achieving low latency reads in a transactionally consistent, multi-region database is a unique challenge. In CockroachDB, two approaches are frequently used: geo-partitioning data so that it is located in the region where it is accessed most frequently, and historical reads, which read slightly stale data from local replicas. However, there is a third approach that is used less frequently because it fits a narrower use case: global tables. Global tables offer low-latency non-stale reads from all regions at the cost of higher write latency, and they can be used in many cases where the workload has a high read to write ratio.

Jon St. John

November 8, 2022

In my technical journey, I struggled to find a simple tool that gave me the flexibility to collect and deliver data to other monitoring tools. Until, one day, I found it.

Julian Hernandez

November 7, 2022

As part of zero-trust focus, InfoSec and Risk teams pay extra attention to data exfiltration threat vectors, including both when it comes to how service providers manage their data, and how to control & manage insider risk exposure through their employees. Solutions to a number of those requirements manifest in the form of network security controls, especially for egress. With regard to database clusters, restricting clusters to access only specific resources for things like backup-restore, publishing real-time change events, or sending observability data can be challenging.

Let game developers develop games. It doesn’t exactly sound revolutionary. But back in the day, that’s not always how things worked. Every game had its own systems for things like stat tracking, item purchases, user entitlements (in-game items a user has purchased or unlocked), and game devs often got bogged down building bespoke functionality into each of their games to handle these user features.

Charlie Custer

November 3, 2022

Serverless application stacks have been stuck in a dilemma: Most applications need some kind of state store, but most state stores aren’t serverless. Rich-data applications like payment apps, buy online/pick up in store services, and real-time online sports betting are incompatible with fully serverless architecture simply because, at some point, the database becomes a bottleneck. Why?

Keith McClellan

October 27, 2022

So you’ve spun up a free CockroachDB cluster, and now you’ve got a next-generation distributed SQL database. That’s great! Now, how do you actually get your data into it? Thankfully, there are lots of ways to get your data into CockroachDB. So many, in fact, that we can’t actually cover all of them. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the most common ways to get your data into CockroachDB, whether you’re working with a database dump from something like MySQL or PostgreSQL, or you’ve just got a CSV you exported from Excel.

Charlie Custer

October 24, 2022

*Note: this post originally ran in 2020, at the very beginning of our managed service/multi-tenant engineering journey. If you want an update on what kind of deployment models CockroachDB offers and what our current capabilities are check out our latest release blog. There’s this really fun game I like to play. You get a bunch of SREs in a room and you see how quickly you can rile them up. Here are some things to say next time you’re in a room of SREs:

Josh Imhoff

October 20, 2022

For Devsisters, Cookie Run: Kingdom has been a particularly tasty success. The game has amassed more than ten million downloads, and handles hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. At peak traffic hours, it is sometimes processing 60,000 transactions per second. In this blog we’ll get into the architecture that supports a viral video game platform.

Charlie Custer

October 19, 2022

Automation tools like HashiCorp Terraform solve an important problem: they remove the burden of manual processes like the creation of cloud infrastructure or the deployment of applications. Terraform does this by allowing you to define the desired state of your infrastructure or application, and when you run the software, will talk to the relevant APIs of the requested service provider. It will then make the desired changes to deploy or amend the required infrastructure to deliver the desired outcome (this is called Infrastructure as Code (IaC)).