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Star Wars and SQL began together. In 1977, the first (eventually fourth) Star Wars film debuted in theaters. In that same year an emerging English language-based structured query language for data, originally called SEQUEL, was renamed to SQL*. For the Rebellion, it was A New Hope to fight the Empire. For the rest of us, it was the birth of a nifty little world-changing technology known as the relational database.

Michelle Gienow

July 22, 2022

The 2022 Cloud Report represents our deepest dive yet into how the three public clouds – AWS, GCP, and Azure – perform for OLTP applications. And while we’ve highlighted some of the most interesting findings in the report’s Insights section, the full report runs nearly 80 pages. There are many interesting details that didn’t make it into that top-level summary.

Charlie Custer

July 21, 2022

With so many things out there for an application developer to learn, we are often asked: why should I spend time learning SQL? It’s a valid question! With ORMs available to translate most popular programming languages into SQL, it’s quite possible to develop an application that uses a SQL database without actually needing to know much SQL. But there are lots of reasons why devs should still learn SQL. In fact, SQL is an important tool that can help with everything from performance optimization to debugging. Let’s take a look at just a few of the reasons why developers should learn SQL:

Charlie Custer

July 20, 2022

In a cluster spanning multiple geographical regions, Global Tables let database clients in any region read data with region-local latencies. Imagine a table with data that is read from all over the world: say, for example, a table of exchange rates in a global bank’s database. Queries ran on behalf of users anywhere might access these rates. This is in contrast to other types of data (say, a user’s account data) which have an affinity to the user’s own region. Global Tables make accessing these exchange rates fast.

There are two different ways to use CockroachDB as a managed service and enjoy DBaaS benefits: CockroachDB Dedicated is a fully managed single-tenant service used by companies to store their data while adhering to their enterprise compliance requirements. CockroachDB Serverless offers automatically scalable service for building new and nimble applications while paying for only what you use.

CockroachDB Dedicated and CockroachDB Serverless — CockroachDB’s fully managed DBaaS offerings — allows global organizations to focus on building groundbreaking applications and let the database handle their transactional data at required scale, with high availability and multi region disaster proofing capability. These customers trust CockroachDB to store their data in a secure manner with guardrails similar to what they would implement in their own infrastructure.

Tomorrow, as you undoubtedly know, is day-one of an annual two-day retail event known as “Amazon Prime Day”. Two days of frenetic consumerism that stress Amazon’s architecture in much the same way that Black Friday and Cyber Monday stress the whole retail industry. In 2018 Amazon’s site served a 404 error for hours on Prime Day. But there’s no need to pick on Amazon…J. Crew, Macy’s, H&M, Lowes and others have all endured costly downtime during peak traffic. Three years of masks and stay-at-home mandates forced users to online shopping and forced retailers to scale their online operations to serve unprecedented customer volume. Some even had to establish their first-ever digital presence in order to survive widespread lockdowns that shuttered physical retailers. Survivability established, next came the need to meet equally unrelenting customer demands for fast and personalized user experiences across a vast spectrum of digital devices and platforms. Now elastic scalability, sophisticated personalization, and a seamless omnichannel experience are simply table stakes for modern retail organizations. That’s why choosing the right database infrastructure has become a business imperative. Not just to support surging high-transaction workloads, but also to ensure survival in the face of several dire trends facing retailers today.

Michelle Gienow

July 11, 2022

In simple terms, a relational (SQL) database stores structured data that conforms to a predefined schema. A document-model (or NoSQL) database stores documents that may contain unstructured data without a schema. At least, that’s the way that these two database storage models have traditionally been discussed.

Jim Walker

July 7, 2022

To show how easy it is to use CockroachDB in a real-world project, we’re going to build and deploy a production-ready application with basic CRUD functionality. Together, we’ll build a Ruby on Rails application that simulates a game leaderboard, using Active Record to talk with our CockroachDB Serverless database. Cockroach Labs maintains the ActiveRecord Adapter Gem, a direct extension of the PostgreSQL adapter. This makes it very straightforward to switch from a default option to CockroachDB. We’ll be using Ruby 3.0 to build a Rails app running Rails version 6.1.4. At the end of the tutorial, we’ll deploy the application to the internet on Heroku, which is running on AWS behind the scenes.