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It was around the year 2010 when a customer of mine implemented data governance software and policies around the data within their production database. They put in the effort to ensure that their production data and systems were protected from prying eyes of a hacker and the treacherous fingers of an unscrupulous software programmer. However, they left their development and test database environments relatively alone with little to no data controls in place. Worse yet, they extracted production data to be used in development. Then a breach occurred in their development environment (you know, the one with production data). The breach resulted in millions of records containing credit card information and customer information being stolen. The result was a multi-million dollar fine.

Jeff Carlson

August 24, 2022

Indexes are a crucial part of your database schema. They improve workload performance by helping the database locate data without having to scan every row of a table. Although it might be tempting to create an index for every column that your workload uses to filter data, it’s important to consider the performance tradeoffs of indexes. While indexes greatly improve the performance of read queries that use filters, they do come with a cost to write performance: data has to be written for all indexes present on the table.

Marylia Gutierrez

August 23, 2022

The details in this post are based on The Netflix Tech Blog post titled “Towards a Reliable Device Management Platform”. The Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry is extremely profitable – it has raked in billions of dollars each year for the last several years. The U.S. M&E industry is the largest in the world, valued at $660 billion (of the $2 trillion global market) despite seeing a 7.3% year-on-year decline in 2020 due to the pandemic. While the pandemic accelerated existing trends (i.e. the streaming subscription model), it halted others (i.e. box office sales). Many M&E companies had to pivot their business model to stay competitive. For example, we saw several studios release first-run movies directly to streaming services, which allowed them to expand to an even larger audience. The M&E industry is on the rebound from 2020, and major players are figuring out new ways to build relationships with customers that last years, not weeks. One thing that’s been clear is the importance of creating an agile business model that allows you to iterate on new ideas and quickly adapt to market changes driven by customer demands.

Cassie McAllister

August 18, 2022

Trying to choose between the three main public cloud providers – AWS, GCP, and Azure – isn’t easy. There are a lot of factors to consider, and no single cloud provider is going to be the best option for every use case. When it comes to running OLTP workloads, though, we wanted to see if any of the clouds stood out in terms of price for performance. In our 2022 Cloud Report, we ran extensive testing on 56 different instance types across the three clouds to answer that question for our customers.

Charlie Custer

August 12, 2022

It’s the second half of a tense semifinal in the World Cup. England, who haven’t won the tournament in half a century, are deadlocked with Croatia at 1-1, and time is ebbing away. The pressure is mounting.

Charlie Custer

August 4, 2022

Observability is how you understand the current state of your database: how it is behaving, plus any potentially problematic things you should be paying attention to — and identifying improvements based on this information.

Marylia Gutierrez

August 1, 2022

When building a table in a SQL database, one of the most important decisions is what to use for a primary key. This can have a big impact on the efficiency of your queries. It also becomes critically important when you start creating relationships between tables.

Full text indexing and search is such a common feature of applications these days. Users expect to be able to find a restaurant, a product, a movie review, or any number of other things quickly by entering a few search terms into a user interface. Many of these apps are built using a relational database as the data store, so the apps aren’t generally dedicated to search, but incorporate that as an added feature.

Michael Goddard

July 27, 2022

In order to learn how to use CockroachDB with a JPA provider like Hibernate, let’s build a Spring Boot application that stores details of video game leaderboards in a CockroachDB database hosted on the CockroachDB Serverless platform.