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CockroachDB is designed to deliver bulletproof resilience. But even the world’s safest boat needs to carry life jackets. The same principle applies to your data, which is why we’ve baked a breadth of Backup and Restore capabilities into CockroachDB.

As long as you’re willing to follow the rules, deploying on Kubernetes and air travel can be quite pleasant. More often than not, things will “just work”. However, if one is interested in traveling with an alligator that must remain alive or scaling a database that must remain available, the situation is likely to become a bit more complicated. It may even be easier to build one’s own plane or database for that matter. Traveling with reptiles aside, scaling a highly available stateful system is no trivial task.

A global financial data firm migrated off its legacy Oracle infrastructure, creating a single hybrid, geo-partitioned deployment of CockroachDB. Frustrated by its legacy Oracle database architecture, a major American financial data firm wanted to consolidate its legacy databases and migrate to public cloud infrastructure.

Jessica Edwards

February 8, 2021

What you build and how you build it should not be dictated by your database. The tools and frameworks that you’re familiar with should be compatible with your database of choice. This is why modern database solutions have implemented support for third part tools like Pony ORM, Hibernate, GORM, jOOQ and others. Developers are beginning to expect to be able to bend the database to their will. And they should - because the flexibility leads to better applications.

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.