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Cockroaches first evolved more than 300M years ago, and yet the O.G. is still recognizable. "Modern" cockroaches are about 200M years old; that they're still with us, largely unchanged, is quite impressive from an evolutionary perspective.

Spencer Kimball

May 20, 2022

Welcome! If you find yourself here wondering What does “serverless database" even mean? you may want to start with Andy Kimball’s introduction to serverless architecture post before coming back to dive in with us here. On the flip side, if you’re already thinking How ARE you running a serverless database on Kubernetes? Sometimes, my deployments take 10 minutes to fully roll out and my eyes are fully-featured YAML parsers. Theytoldmethiswouldbebetter! — you’ve come to the right blog post.

Everyone here at Cockroach Labs is thrilled about the publication of our very own O’Reilly tome, CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide. Seriously delighted — as in, just-found-out-the-rest-of-today’s-meetings-are-all-canceled level of happiness. We are beyond proud to have our own hefty tech book with an iconic animal on the cover. (Or, even better, iconic insect on the cover since the fine folks at O’Reilly Media agreed to let us have a cockroach on ours). Most of all, we are delighted to have the complete workings of CockroachDB collected in a single, thorough and hands-on resource to help make distributed SQL accessible to even more users. This is thanks in large part due to Guy Harrison, who is quite literally The Guy Who Wrote The Book On CockroachDB. Guy co-authored the Definitive Guide with Cockroach Labs co-founder and chief architect, Ben Darnell, and our head of education, Jesse Seldess. “Guy’s deep existing database knowledge paired with his diligence in learning Cockroach just as deeply contributed immeasurably to the scope and thoroughness of the book,” Ben commented.

Michelle Gienow

May 10, 2022

When you’re standing up a quick prototype of a web application, you probably don’t think much about how your database will scale. But in the long run, scale matters. And while scaling and deploying a highly available relational database used to be both expensive and challenging, today it’s pretty straightforward and completely free. There’s really no reason not to start with a database that’ll scale automatically.

Charlie Custer

May 9, 2022

*Note: This blog was originally published in 2017. Everything is still true today. It is being updated to include additional capabilities in CockroachDB. Namely, bounded staleness reads. The CAP theorem is a fundamental part of the theory of distributed systems. It states that in the presence of partitions (i.e. network failures), a system cannot be both consistent and available, and must choose one of the two.

Ben Darnell

May 5, 2022

CockroachDB is a distributed relational database that enables users to scale their application and production software without hardware limitations. CockroachDB Serverless is the fastest way to get started using this relational database. It only takes two steps: sign up using your GitHub account, then connect your cluster using the connection information relevant to your system’s operating system. Integrating CockroachDB into a Django application is seamless thanks to its feature-rich object-relational mapping (ORM) that lets us interact with the database using a fluent object-oriented API.

3 basic rules for choosing indexes There are a few basic rules to keep in mind when choosing indexes for a database. A good index should have these three properties: Usefulness: Speed up the execution of some queries (or enforce a constraint) Clustering: Keep records that are likely to be accessed together near each other Scattering: Keep records that are unlikely to be accessed together far apart

Ben Darnell

May 3, 2022

CockroachDB helps small to large organizations manage their transactional data at global scale, with high-availability, while providing multi-cloud & hybrid disaster proofing capabilities. Many of those customers trust CockroachDB to store PII or organizationally sensitive data, and they secure it with native data security capabilities in the product. But there are some needs that require reimagination of how one looks at data security at different kinds of scale - across different business units or teams, across multiple CockroachDB clusters, or across multiple types of data stores including OLTP and OLAP.

In this tutorial, we’ll create an app for coordinating social events. In the process, you’ll see how simple it can be to create a web application powered by Next.js and hosted on Vercel. The tutorial will also demonstrate how quickly we can create a fully-fledged relational database on the cloud without installing it locally.

Aydrian Howard

April 29, 2022