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It’s a bit of a race, isn’t it? You have to get your MVP out the door quickly and you need to use the right technology to get you across the finish line. We’ve talked about building with the right tech stack from the start to ensure you can scale, and preventing yourself from building up too much tech debt. Now we are going to assume you made the right choice and are using CockroachDB (yes, we are biased).

Theodore Hyman

April 21, 2022

A recent tweet inspired me to address the need for fuzzy matching by combining some existing capabilities of CockroachDB. Note the key features mentioned in the tweet: - similar but not equal sporting events names: a common pattern. Users tend to mis-type data in input fields, and data isn’t always correct. Nevertheless, we’d like to return the closest match. - I’d rather use this in-built feature than pay for a whole ES cluster with added maintenance overhead to boot: This is the second time I’ve heard this sentiment in the past couple of months. ES is a full-featured search engine and delivers a great experience but, for this purpose, would be overkill and would require additional time and expense to deploy and operate.

Michael Goddard

April 18, 2022

*Guest post alert! Mike Roberts has been an engineer as well as a CTO. He is the co-author of this O’Reilly Book and is a partner at Symphonia. He blogs at https://blog.symphonia.io/.

In this article, we’re building a full-stack web app that simulates a game leaderboard. The idea is to make it as simple as possible — one page to display the leaderboard listing and another to add new leaderboard entries. As a Python developer, you are likely familiar with the language’s simplicity. You can choose from various web development frameworks, but if you’re aiming for an uncomplicated Python web app, then Flask is your friend.

Syndication from What Does Write Skew Look Like by Justin Jaffray This post is about gaining intuition for Write Skew, and, by extension, Snapshot Isolation. Snapshot Isolation is billed as a transaction isolation level that offers a good mix between performance and correctness, but the precise meaning of “correctness” here is often vague. In this post I want to break down and capture exactly when the thing called “write skew” can happen.

If you use a database, at some point you’ll need to modify your schema design. Maybe you need to store new kinds of information. Perhaps you’ll add a field to a table or even need to change a primary key. Regardless of the reason, application requirements tend to change over time - and you’ll need to migrate. We know how important schema modification is, which is why we’ve built zero-downtime online schema changes and online primary key changes into CockroachDB.

All early startups share the same first goal. No matter which sector you’re aiming to disrupt, and no matter what groundbreaking new product or service you plan to disrupt it with, your prime directive is Get to MVP. Fast. After all, until you have something that people are willing to buy, your startup is really only an idea, not a company. The pressure is on to launch your product or service as fast as possible and so embracing easy, “right enough for now” technical solutions makes sense in the early chaos of startup life. But as you start to find success — once you’ve built and launched that first crucial offering and customers start calling, once you begin hiring more teams to grow both your product and the organization that supports it — the limitations of your initial technical decisions are going to make themselves known.

Michelle Gienow

March 23, 2022

My name is Aika Zikibayeva and I am a Partner Marketing Manager at Cockroach Labs. I am part of the Product Marketing team, yet in my day-to-day responsibilities, I maintain a tight-knit collaboration with the Channels & Alliances team.

Imagine walking into this: “About 4 million lines of PHP code, written by underpaid, sometimes not well meaning, freelancers and students over the span of 8 years. The CEO wrote a large part, but stopped learning new techniques around 2004.” That’s how bad tech debt can get when a startup is run without considering that all of those messy shortcuts will eventually have to get cleaned up.

Charlie Custer

March 22, 2022