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What’s the best way to do a database migration? It’s a challenging question. No single approach is going to be the best fit for every use case. However, after speaking with LaunchDarkly Senior Distributed Systems Engineer Justin Caballero in a recent webinar, we think LaunchDarkly’s migration from Postgres and MongoDB to CockroachDB presents some great database migration best practices.

Charlie Custer

July 26, 2021

Retailers often function in distributed application environments, with data squirreled away in databases around the country, or even the globe. It’s totally common to use different solutions for different workloads — for example, Cassandra for fast data reads with Oracle as the primary system of record. Often these different apps each do their specific job well, but getting them to talk to each other? Not so good.

Michelle Gienow

July 23, 2021

Kubernetes adoption has massively accelerated, leading the way to a new, cloud-native approach to building and delivering the software that businesses need to make users happy and employees successful. Slow and heavy lifting has been replaced with interchangeable, self-contained software objects that can be configured by a simple configuration and scaled through automated replication. If an object fails, it is replaced. To deliver new software, objects are replaced while still in motion.

As a developer, you are often faced with the question: why is my application slow? You may have already identified the database as the bottleneck (even this process can take some troubleshooting), and you then find yourself asking: Which queries are slow? Which queries should I be troubleshooting? The query troubleshooting journey starts by first isolating the offending query that is issued by your application.

Kevin Ngo

July 21, 2021

CockroachDB has gained powerful spatial data capabilities since the 20.2 release. One of the great things about this is that the spatial features are compatible with the excellent PostGIS spatial data extension for PostgreSQL (with some caveats). In my opinion, PostGIS is the gold standard for spatial data management. I’m the maintainer of Hibernate-Spatial: an optional module which extends Hibernate with spatial capabilities. I was asked by Cockroach Labs to write a spatial dialect for CockroachDB. This dialect was introduced in version 5.4.30.Final.

About 75 percent of container orchestration is done in Kubernetes. But the popularity of the k8s platform doesn’t mean it’s easy to use in all scenarios. Kubernetes can have a steep learning curve, especially when it comes to managing state and storage. In a recent episode of “The Cockroach Hour”, Director of Product Marketing Jim Walker sat down with Keith McClellan, one of Cockroach’s Solutions Engineers, to chat about the storage and data challenges that you’ll encounter deploying Kubernetes, and how running it with CockroachDB can simplify those challenges.

CockroachDB on Kubernetes is now in general availability, providing users with a Kubernetes database and a custom, open source Operator [available on GitHub and in the RedHat Marketplace] that automates deployment, management, and maintenance. This release enables teams at any skill level to run a relational database on Kubernetes. More organizations are shifting to a cloud native architecture that makes use of containerized apps and services [read: How does Bose use Kubernetes & CockroachDB?], and they are looking for strong, proven platforms. Kubernetes enables organizations to automate the deployment and management of container-based services, providing huge value for organizations operating in the cloud.

Meagan Goldman

July 15, 2021

AllSaints is a 27-year-old global fashion retail business headquartered in the UK. We have brick and mortar locations all over the world and historically the business has depended massively on brick and mortar sales. And so it came as a surprise and relief to me that our customers were so willing to shift their behaviors during the pandemic and shop online, which helped us maintain healthy revenue numbers.

In two hours (the same amount of time it takes to binge two episodes of The Witcher) you will build a ride-sharing application with Node.js and CockroachDB. That’s the beauty of this Node.js and CockroachDB fundamentals course just released by Cockroach University: You get real-life, hands on experience with the tools you need to build modern applications. Experience with modern application architectures, and with distributed databases in particular, is becoming a regular requirement for open roles at great companies like Roblox, Accenture, Netflix, Apple, and others. This Node.js course is a quick way to gain the requisite experience so that you can demonstrate your distributed systems skills in an interview.

Dan Kelly

July 14, 2021