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When you’re working with distributed systems, data storage and retrieval aren’t as straightforward as they are in legacy monolithic databases. This comes with advantages like resilience and high availability, but it means that performance monitoring of a given transaction can be challenging. Query execution is often an extremely complex web of interactions. Following and analyzing performance bottlenecks in this environment can be difficult and sometimes frustrating to get to the root cause. For this reason we added distributed tracing to our UI and made an accompanying tutorial below.

Companies like Cockroach Labs are first and foremost groups of people; people with passions and drives that go beyond what they do for work. This is, by and large, what drives organizations to consider how to best enable their staff to make an impact on their communities through volunteerism, donations, and action. As a company, we have emphasized doing good in our corporate giving initiatives: we match referral bonuses with an equivalent donation to a 501(c)(3) charity of our staff’s choice, run marketing campaigns geared towards amassing donations to groups such as Women Who Code and Black Girls Code, and establish an employee-led committee each year to decide where to donate a significant corporate gift. Still, many of our people have other ways of giving back. To give Roachers the time and space they need to be forces of good, we’ve established Connect and Contribute Days: company time dedicated for our people to learn, seek understanding, grow, volunteer, mobilize, or otherwise make a positive change.

Whether you’re a developer or operator, we want to give you the observability tools you need to monitor your CockroachDB cluster. This includes standard tools such as logs, metrics like Prometheus and health endpoints, and alerting. But modern observability requires more than just the standard tools.

Andy Woods

January 26, 2021

It’s 2021 and the in-store shopping experience is still on pause with many stores shutting their doors forever. Online shopping is no longer the future of retail, but the new reality of retail. On average, ecommerce sales grew 32.4% year-over-year with some retailers (Best Buy, Target) seeing over 100% growth. 2020 forced retailers to rethink the way they do business and the way they reach their customers. Smaller businesses were forced to take their sales online, while larger businesses needed to find new, creative ways to stay ahead of the growing ecommerce competition. Organizations that have the bandwidth and the money to build data-intensive applications are changing the customer experience. They offer extremely personalized applications and doubled down on targeted advertising. With so much competition online, if you don’t innovate your business to meet the status-quo, you will struggle to survive. Looking ahead, how will this new “digital shopping experience” affect your bottom line? Will you acquire as many customers this year without the physical experience? Will you be able to expand your online services to new audiences? In the era of COVID-19, to reach your revenue goals it’s important to have the ability to scale your business and reach new customers regardless of where they are located. In this post, we will cover three strategies retailers can take to ensure they meet their revenue goals this year.

Cassie McAllister

January 25, 2021

While not exactly envious of our current crop of interns (because, you know, the whole work from home thing), I’ll admit I find myself reminiscing back to when I was one myself. I’m still surprised the engineering team let me anywhere near the stuff they did. When I first interned four years ago, we had declared a just code yellow to focus our energy towards stabilizing CRDB. Having joined the newly-formed distributed query execution1 team, but now with its focus directed elsewhere, what this meant for me was free rein to flesh out distributed hash and merge joins2, few aggregation primitives (think SUM, COUNT, DISTINCT, etc.), and some sorting algorithms.

Since January 28, 2020, the EU has issued $192 million (€158.5 million) in fines for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) violations (DLA Piper, Engadget). Although companies have had years to become fully GDPR compliant, compliance is not easy. After the GDPR took effect in 2018, we had a conversation with Cockroach Labs co-founder and CEO Spencer Kimball on the topic, who detailed the nuances of the law and what companies should do to comply within the context of their databases. This is a recap of that conversation from 2018.

CockroachDB users trust us with their most sensitive data (see: healthcare, finance). And the best way for us to maintain that trust is for Cockroach Labs to never see this data at all. In CockroachDB v20.2, our tooling is able to automatically redact users' sensitive data out of log files, so that Cockroach Labs never even receives it. We also do this always for crash report telemetry.

The 2021 Cloud Report stands on benchmarks. Now in its third year, our report is more precise than ever, capturing an evaluation of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that tells realistic and universal performance stories on behalf of mission-critical OLTP applications.

When it comes to learning, we have all benefited from social learning in the workplace. Social learning is an opportunity for people to learn from one another through programs that help us share knowledge such as peer mentorship, or attending a lunch and learn, where someone shares their expertise with the broader company. Though sometimes unconscious, we are able to learn and observe by example and then apply what we take away to our own work.