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Like all software systems, metrics are crucial for understanding the inner workings of a system and getting a pulse on how that system is functioning. Any monitoring and debugging framework is incomplete without metrics.

The gaming industry is all about delivering a great end-user experience which means building relationships with players that last years, not days. They can do this by instilling predictability, reliability, and creating a strong brand by giving players what they want: a new and better gaming experience each time. However, the success of a new game or platform is often unpredictable. A game can become successful overnight and the amount of concurrent players can surge within a few hours causing slowdowns or the inability to login. Or the game may never reach a certain level of popularity that it needed to see a ROI.

Cassie McAllister

December 3, 2021

As a developer, you may not have spent a lot of time thinking about database connections. A single database connection is not expensive, but as things scale up, problems can emerge. So let’s (ahem) dive into the world of connection pooling, and take a look at how it can help us build more performant applications, especially when we’re operating at scale.

Charlie Custer

November 30, 2021

As cloud-native web developers, we want to build apps that scale easily. Databases are often a pain point, though. We want the structure and data integrity of relational databases like PostgreSQL, but we also want the easy scalability of NoSQL databases like MongoDB. Until recently, we’ve been forced to choose one or the other. Fortunately, CockroachDB provides the best of both worlds. It’s a robust relational database with full SQL support and all of the features you’d expect in an enterprise-ready database. It supports the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so you can use it with most tools and libraries that support Postgres. But that’s not all: it offers excellent scalability, so you no longer have to choose between relational data integrity or NoSQL scalability. And, if you use CockroachDB Serverless, you don’t have to worry about hosting and scaling a database yourself — so you can focus your efforts on building great apps. This tutorial will show you how to start from scratch and build a modern cloud-native web app using TypeScript, React, Prisma, Netlify serverless functions, and CockroachDB.

Whether you are streaming to an analytics platform for business intelligence or building event-driven services, CockroachDB’s change data capture (CDC) capabilities are powerful and adaptable to your application needs. But how can you leverage your changefeed setup to get the performance that best fits your application? Most changefeed settings & cluster settings outlined here will have some tradeoff associated with them. Going in, you should have an understanding of what you are targeting and compromises you are willing to make. We recommend testing your configuration under your workloads!

Dealing with slow database performance? One potential cause of this problem is database contention. Even if you’re not struggling with a slow database right now, database contention is important to understand. The contention monster often doesn’t rear its ugly head until an application has reached significant scale. It’s best to be prepared, so in this article we’re going to look at both how to avoid contention issues and how to diagnose and resolve them when they do arise. But first, we have to understand what they are.

Charlie Custer

November 22, 2021

Managing resilience, scale, and ease of operations in a containerized world is largely what Kubernetes is all about—and one of the reasons platform adoption has doubled since 2017. And as container orchestration continues to become a dominant DevOps paradigm, the ecosystem has continued to mature with better tools for replication, management, and monitoring of our workloads. And as Kubernetes grows, so does CockroachDB as we’ve recently simplified some of the day 2 operations associated with our distributed database with our Kubernetes Operator. Ultimately, however, our overall goal in the cloud-native community is singular: ease the deployment of stateful workloads on Kubernetes.

Alex Robinson

November 17, 2021

Building a great company culture includes offering strong benefits to employees and great benefit programs that are comprehensive, transparent, and clearly defined. Cockroach Labs excels at this in many regards, and our Parental Leave and Family Support are no exception. CRL understands that every family is unique, recognizing the importance of extending eligibility to not only the birth of an employee’s biological child, but also to any employee who is in the process of adopting or fostering. The support is robust, starting before a parent’s leave period and continuing well after the employee returns to work. With that said, I would be remiss if I didn’t outline what’s “on the books” to support our employees as they prepare for their new addition: - Comprehensive planning and checklist in preparation for leave - $500 baby bucks to put towards essentials - Benefits support through Cocoon and family support resources through Cleo - 12 weeks Parental Leave + 2 weeks paid PTO - Flexibility to utilize leave all at once or in 1-week increments within first 12 months - ReRoachmate pairing upon return (fellow parent Roacher to meet with) - 12 weeks of Family Fridays upon return (20% of time dedicated to spending with family) - #little-roachers Slack channel for parents to share, discuss, and support each other With a parental leave program for all parents, we make it possible for parents of every gender to share in the joys and responsibilities of welcoming a child. The fact that parents have up to a year to take leave after welcoming their new family member allows Roachers and their families flexibility in arranging childcare, too. That said, policies are only meaningful if they are supported, normalized, and championed. And this is the difference between simply describing our Parental Leave policy and actually telling my Parental Leave journey and experience. So here’s my story..

Today we released our latest version, CockroachDB 21.2. Our customers turn to CockroachDB for a highly scalable and resilient relational database — but they also value a familiar and comfortable developer experience, simple integrations with their preferred stack, and easy operations. In CockroachDB 21.2, we’ve extended our capabilities with these core principles in mind:

Meagan Goldman

November 16, 2021