View all

When the performance of your SQL database drops suddenly, do you know why? Tracking performance and linking cause to effect can be tricky with real-world database systems. DBAs, architects, and SREs are often working with multiple database systems, each with multiple databases in various states of development, testing, and production. These systems are often mixed between one or more cloud providers and self-hosted servers. On top of that, the performance of each database is influenced by auto-scaling, constantly-shifting workloads, engineering changes and updates, and more!

Nubank, a leading Brazilian financial technology company valued at more than $45 billion dollars, needed a scalable SQL database for its critical credit card authorization service. The company initially stored data for this service on-prem using an in-memory data store, but as the business rapidly grew (from 12 million customers in 2019 to 40 million customers in 2021), it needed a more scalable solution that would not rely so much on memory and enable Nubank to keep growing. Nubank’s Authorizer team chose CockroachDB due to its ultra-resilience, simple scalability, strong consistency, and easy maintenance. They set up on-prem CockroachDB deployments and migrated their credit card authorization application.

Meagan Goldman

June 25, 2021

If you’re a retail business, your current reality may best be described as “challenging” — even as a flood of pent up post-pandemic consumer spending is unleashed. Thanks to Amazon, customers expect abundant product availability, personalized recommendations, competitive pricing, and fast delivery. Mega retailers like Target and Walmart are fighting back by offering expanded online shopping, in-store shopping services with curbside pickup, and local delivery options — some even same-day.

Michelle Gienow

June 25, 2021

Optimal Systems came to CockroachDB with the best kind of problem: they had become too successful. Optimal was founded in 1991 to meet the European Space Agency’s need to archive its satellite photos. Decades of successful growth saw the storage product they built for the ESA evolve and expand to serve clients in more than 30 countries.

Charlie Custer

June 23, 2021

A few days ago, we (Artem and Chris) were working with two different customers that had the same requirement: they needed to encrypt certain tables in their databases. This is not uncommon. Encryption comes with a slight performance penalty, so many companies prefer not to encrypt their entire database. Instead, the best practice is to encrypt only the tables that contain sensitive information, so less-sensitive data can be accessed without the overhead the encryption creates.

As we outlined in Deploy a Multi-Region Application in Just 3 Steps, we’ve made major changes to simplify the multi-region configuration in CockroachDB. The new abstractions allow users to think of multi-region databases and tables in three ways:

As an SRE on the CockroachDB Dedicated team, we have the unique challenge of monitoring and managing a fleet of CockroachDB clusters around the globe. Perhaps needless to say, as a distributed database, security is an utmost priority for us. To address some of the needs related to security and monitoring (for example intrusion detection audit logging), we’ve invested in our next generation of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) infrastructure.

We are thrilled to share that finance and strategy veteran Lorenzo Montesi has joined Cockroach Labs as our Chief Financial Officer. Lorenzo could not have joined our team at a better time, as we continue our rapid growth in the cloud data market. With our $160 million fundraise at a valuation of $2 billion earlier this year, adoption of our evolutionary database CockroachDB is exploding. Lorenzo will drive our financial planning, analysis, and operations, working closely with our leadership team to scale Cockroach Labs globally during this significant growth phase.

Imagine this: you work in system architecture for a multibillion-dollar consumer-facing business, and it’s the middle of a busy weekend. Suddenly, your database goes down. Transactions aren’t processing. Customers are angry. Logistical issues are stacking up because inventory and warehouse tracking are down. Customer service reps are swamped, but half of the technical staff are twiddling their thumbs because they can’t do their work without a functional database.

Charlie Custer

June 3, 2021