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Cockroach Labs has been investing in early career recruiting since we first started the company. In 2016, only a year after the company’s inception, we brought on our first intern. Since then, we’ve steadily built a program driven by a passion for diversity and inclusion, creativity, and unique perspectives.

It’s been three years since this blog was originally published and we’re still feeling great about our decision to prioritize PostgreSQL compatibility. Customers of ours often reference our PostgreSQL compatibility as a reason why the CockroachDB learning curve is so swift. Check out the latest documentation to see the full scope of our compatibility. And then take a look at the original reasons for the decision.

Thanks to services provided by AWS, GCP, and Azure it’s become relatively easy to develop applications that span multiple regions. This is great because slow apps kill businesses. There is one common problem with these applications: they are not supported by multi-region database architecture. CockroachDB is built to solve that problem and we’re doing it in production for many applications today. But that’s not what this blog is about. In this blog, I will provide a solution for the problem of getting Kubernetes pods to talk to each other in multi-region deployments.

The SQL standard defines four isolation levels (READ UNCOMMITTED, READ COMMITTED, REPEATABLE READ, and SERIALIZABLE). SNAPSHOT is a somewhat popular but non-standard addition to this list. People often reach for these words when they want to talk about behavior in CockroachDB in comparison to other databases, even when the behavior in question is not related to isolation.

Ben Darnell

February 11, 2022

Today I tried signing into MyChart because I got an email notification about a new statement (ugh). The log-in experience was so slow (seconds) that I immediately closed the window and went back to my daily life. I’ll probably never log in again. Point being, a bad user experience is sometimes the last user experience. For growth-focused companies the priority right out of the gates is user experience. They know it needs to be great or they won’t collect enough users and enough revenue (or VC money) to go and build out the feature rich application of their dreams. One obstacle that stands in the way of user experience is the speed of light. It’s too slow (hot take!). The human perceives anything under 100 milliseconds as “instant”. Anything over 200 milliseconds can feel kind of laggy (which leads to people like me never logging into their MyChart).

Dan Kelly

February 3, 2022

Mythical Games, currently valued at $1.25 billion, is one of the top 5 blockchain gaming startups. The four year-old company is part of a relatively niche industry with tremendous potential for growth – blockchain (or crypto) gaming presents opportunities for innovation in areas such as player ownership and player-led economies at scale. Today, the Mythical Platform is offered as-a-service to developers and publishers, allowing them to build or integrate blockchain-based play-to-earn economies into their games. This approach makes blockchain more accessible, and allows players to become stakeholders in their favorite games.

Cassie McAllister

January 28, 2022

The Roacher spotlight series is a celebration of our Roachers, their stories, and the wisdom they can impart to their peers. In this post, we highlight Raydijah Walters from our People team.

The design of CockroachDB is based on Google’s Spanner data storage system. One of the most surprising and inspired facets of Spanner is its use of atomic clocks and GPS clocks to give participating nodes really accurate wall time synchronization. The designers of Spanner call this “TrueTime”, and it provides a tight bound on clock offset between any two nodes in the system. This lets them do pretty nifty things! We’ll elaborate on a few of these below, but chief among them is their ability to leverage tightly synchronized clocks to provide a high level of external consistency (we’ll explain what this is). If someone knows even a little about Spanner, one of the first questions they have is: “You can’t be using atomic clocks if you’re building an open source database; so how the heck does CockroachDB work?”

Spencer Kimball

January 27, 2022

Every day Lush processes hundreds of thousands of transactions in over 950 stores located across 49 different countries. Consistency is important. And inventory management can create extraordinary opportunities when the right tools are used to deliver real-time data insights. In this blog, we’ll cover what Lush’s inventory management architecture looked like before CockroachDB and what they’re able to accomplish with CockroachDB.

Dan Kelly

January 25, 2022