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We are proud to announce a new round of funding at a milestone valuation, which recognizes our company’s rapid growth, happy customers, and our emerging role as a leading cloud-native SQL database. The events of 2020 delivered more change in the past few months for businesses than many of us have experienced in the last 10 years. The impact of stay-at-home orders forced organizations to rapidly adapt to changing consumer behaviors, remote workforces, and explosive growth of digital services. As companies rushed to evolve their businesses and adapt their applications to support the rapid shift to digital-everything, many discovered that they needed more resilient, more easily scalable, and more flexible data infrastructure.

With millions of customers to serve, a major cable company needed to build a virtual customer support agent to scale their customer requests. The app had to provide 24/7 help to users across the United States, and store metadata about customer conversations. The first version of the application was built on Amazon Aurora, in a single cloud region on the east coast of the United States. However, this deployment was vulnerable to failures, and when a networking failure in an AWS region knocked the entire service offline, the team realized that Aurora’s single-master architecture was not sufficient to attain the always-on customer experience they wanted. They needed to explore other options in hopes of migrating the app.

Support for spatial data and spatial indexing is one of the most requested features in the history of CockroachDB. The first issue requesting spatial data in CockroachDB was opened in October 2017, and closed on November 12, 2020 with the release of spatial data storage in CockroachDB 20.2.

Support for spatial data and spatial indexing is one of the most requested features in the history of CockroachDB. The first issue requesting spatial data in CockroachDB was opened in October 2017, and closed on November 12, 2020 with the release of spatial data storage in CockroachDB 20.2.

CockroachDB was conceived as open source software, and we are proud that CockroachDB remains open source to this day. Throughout our journey, our community has made valuable contributions to our product. Over the course of our existence, we have had over 1590 commits from over 320 external contributors across all our open source repositories. Today, we want to thank all our wonderful external contributors. In this blog post, we celebrate open source contributions across the CockroachDB repositories, with a glimpse of how we manage contributions to our own repo. We take a closer look at the impact of external contributions on the spatial offering for v20.2 and CockroachDB ORMs. We also take a look at how we encouraged first-time open source contributors during Hacktoberfest 2020. Finally, we recognize all our external contributors and celebrate their work.

One of the main reasons our customers choose CockroachDB is the easy horizontal scalability it offers, while maintaining data consistency with serializable isolation. This combination lets customers run critical OLTP workloads, like financial ledgers and e-commerce shopping carts, at large scale without the hassle of legacy sharding. With every release, we make significant investments in improving CockroachDB’s performance and scale. We measure CockroachDB’s performance through many diverse tests, including the industry-standard TPC-C benchmark to track our progress across releases. Our latest version, CockroachDB 20.2, passed 140K warehouses with a maximum throughput of 1.7M transactions per minute (tpmC) on TPC-C. This represents a 40% improvement with the same resources as compared to the results previously reported with CockroachDB 19.2 in this post. Additionally, CockroachDB 20.2 was able to load TPC-C 140K in less than 3 hours compared to the ~20 hours it took to load TPC-C 100K in 19.2. This improvement was the result of faster bulk-data loading, which built upon work in Pebble, CockroachDB’s new storage engine.

How is Lyft able to tell you how far away your driver is? How does DoorDash give accurate estimates for the food you just ordered? Both of these satisfying user experiences are possible because of spatial data. In this blog we’ll cover the basics of spatial data and then show some examples of common applications and use cases that use spatial data.

Dan Kelly

November 18, 2020

I’m a database nerd. Or, to be more precise, a DBMS nerd. What I love most about them is that while they’re everywhere, and modern society could not function without them, they’re incredibly difficult to build well. Part of this difficulty stems from the fact that databases are complex, and their construction borrows from nearly all fields of Computer Science.

Adam Storm

November 17, 2020

With 29 CockroachDB apps created and 33 Docs issues closed, it’s officially a wrap on CockroachDB’s Hacktoberfest 2020 project. While planning for Hacktoberfest, we asked our community: what holds them back from contributing to open source and how we could help them overcome those obstacles?

Amruta Ranade

November 13, 2020