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Very few traditions can melt the corporate ice as well as an ugly holiday sweater contest. Which is why, this past December, I took on the challenge of building an Ugly Sweater Voting Application to entertain our 100% distributed team. The application (which can be used to vote on any images - not just ugly sweaters) consists of a dashboard that displays the status of the contest and a serverless backend that facilitates bootstrapping the dashboard and handling updates from SMS messages using websockets. The results of the contest were…ugly! (Aside from our CEO, of course, who somehow wore an ugly sweater but made it fashion.)

Aydrian Howard

September 14, 2022

While many companies have long since moved their application data and analytics data into the cloud, operational data has lagged a bit behind. There are a variety of reasons for this, but a primary one is that operational data is often both sensitive (containing PII) and mission-critical. Many companies are hesitant to fix something that, from their perspective, has not been broken, and hesitant to put critical data into the hands of people outside the company. This mindset is changing fast, though. While the old model may not be fully broken for everyone, it is breaking. For one thing, in 2022 the old way has simply become too expensive. And managed cloud database options are maturing, addressing some of the performance and security concerns that early adopters once had about them.

Charlie Custer

September 13, 2022

As I’ve written before, I had a number of great job opportunities when I was finishing up my PhD at MIT five years ago. Choosing which offer to accept was difficult, but in the end I was confident in my decision to join Cockroach Labs. The fact that I’m still here nearly five years later is an indication that not only did I make the right decision about where to start my post-graduate career, but the company has continued to be a place that both excites and challenges me in ways I didn’t anticipate back then. This blog post describes my journey to Cockroach Labs and why I’m still excited to go to work every day (hint: it has everything to do with people and nothing to do with insects).

I’m often asked by developers how they can squeeze the most performance out of their database. While there are other SQL performance best practices to consider, by far the easiest (and biggest) performance improvement comes from good use of indexes. I’ll break this down into two categories: (1), knowing what’s possible, and (2) knowing what you’re actually getting.

Existing traditional banking processes, interfaces, and underwriting methods don’t adequately help startup companies control their finances. Traditional banking infrastructure is too rigid. It doesn’t scale easily enough to meet the needs of startup companies that are likely to see adoption at unexpected intervals. Tribal Credit exists to bridge the gap between what traditional financial services offer and what startups and SMBs actually need. Currently Tribal Credit has more than 2K customers worldwide. Their business started in the U.S. in 2016, but over the past few years they’ve expanded to new regions. As business grew beyond borders, their infrastructure started to reveal limitations with scale.

Cassie McAllister

September 7, 2022

What do you do when you need the speed of a NoSQL database and the consistency of a relational database at the same time? That’s the challenge that confronted Form3, a UK-based company that provides financial institutions with easy access to managed payments infrastructure via an API, when they kicked off a new project.

Charlie Custer

September 5, 2022

TL;DR - Multi-region application architecture makes applications more resilient and improves end-user experiences by keeping latencies low for a distributed user base. This blog will dive into each of the top five reasons why multi-region application architecture is worth building.

Meagan Goldman

September 1, 2022

There are occasions in which businesses need their database to fit into unusual production environments for specific use cases. In this blog, we’ll push the boundaries and test whether CockroachDB can work and thrive in new and unusual places, such as: • On an IBM Mainframe • On an ARM64 CPU

Jeffrey White

August 30, 2022

The latest research paper from CockroachDB’s engineering team, “A Demonstration of Multi-Region CockroachDB”, will appear in the Demonstration Track of the VLDB 2022 conference in Sydney, Australia (as well as remotely), on September 5-9. This paper complements our recent full paper, Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB, which appeared earlier this year in SIGMOD 2022.