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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

Moving and processing data between systems is a common pain point. Users need up-to-date data across systems for use in business analytics, for event-driven architectures, for creating audit trails, or for archiving data. One way to do that is to set up an external service that regularly polls the database for changes.

‘Tis the season for gift giving. And, if you’re like me, you enjoy getting gifts for dogs. Atticus (my tri-color corgi) gets his fair share of balls and stuffed toys (that he promptly destroys), but those are all from me. We’ve never participated in a pet-specific holiday gift exchange before, until this year. While Atticus doesn’t have his own Instagram account, mine is pretty much exclusively Atticus content and we follow many of his corgi friends. In a recent story, his friend Lulu invited fellow dog owners to join a gift exchange. All that’s required is for me to send a gift valued at least $10 to the assigned dog and in return, Atticus could receive anywhere between 6-36 gifts!

Aydrian Howard

December 16, 2022

For multi-tenant mixed-workload systems like CockroachDB, performance predictability and isolation are critical. Most forms of shared infrastructure approximate these properties, be it through physical isolation within data centers, virtualized resource limits, drastic over-provisioning, and more. For CockroachDB it’s not just about protecting latencies across workload/tenant boundaries, it’s also about isolation from the system’s internal/elastic work like LSM compactions, MVCC garbage collection, and backups, and also from user-initiated bulk work like changefeed backfills. For ill-considered reasons this is something they let me work on. Here we’ll describe generally applicable techniques we applied under the umbrella of admission control, how we arrived at them, and why they were effective. We’ll use control theory, study CPU scheduler latencies, build forms of cooperative scheduling, and patch the Go runtime. We hope for it to be relevant to most systems builders (and aspiring ones!), even if the problems motivating the work were found in this oddly-named database.

Secure authentication is a fundamental requirement when evaluating a database product. Architecture and Security teams prefer capabilities which could somehow be managed centrally, ideally using existing security tools in the enterprise tech stack. Over decades of advancements in the OLTP database ecosystem, we’ve seen a number of solutions emerge for secure authentication. Whether it be PKI/certificates, LDAP integration with enterprise identity directory, GSSAPI/Kerberos, SCRAM and so on, those mechanisms have enabled organizations to adopt a variety of new databases over time. We also support most of those capabilities in CockroachDB that are utilized by the majority of our security-conscious customers.

We’ve been planning a visit to Orange County, California, where I grew up, over the upcoming holidays. My favorite Mexican restaurant is there, in Placentia: Q-Tortas! I have frequent cravings for their carnitas burrito, so a visit there is obligatory (I promise this blog is about search).

Michael Goddard

December 12, 2022