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Like many industries, the financial services business is undergoing dramatic change. In response to the whole world going digital and the explosion of data available to drive decision making and customer experiences, banks are pursuing aggressive innovation in new applications and cloud infrastructure.

Spencer Kimball

November 5, 2020

In last week's episode of The Cockroach Hour, Jim Walker chatted with Cockroach Labs PMs Piyush Singh and Tommy Truongchau, along with security lead Aaron Blum, to talk about security features in CockroachDB. The full video is available here, and the transcript is below.

In last week's episode of The Cockroach Hour, Jim Walker chatted with Red Hat principal product manager Scott McCarty to talk about everything from the what the future of serverless and distroless are, to what happens when you run Oracle on Kubernetes. The full video is available here, and the transcript is below.

CockroachDB is a Distributed SQL database. That means for the person doing the querying, everything looks like the SQL they’ve known for years. But under the hood, there’s a lot more going on. In order to achieve the bulletproof resiliency and elastic scalability CockroachDB delivers, data is replicated and geographically distributed across nodes of a cluster, and read and write requests are automatically routed between nodes as appropriate. Replication and geo-distribution mean that your nodes have a shape--a topology--and how you design that topology allows you to make important tradeoffs regarding latency and resilience.

There’s a new paradigm in the database industry: Databases-as-a-Service. With their inherent advantages in elasticity, cost of ownership, and provisioning flexibility, the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) model is quickly becoming the easy choice for small companies and startups. But in enterprise environments, navigating a paradigm shift like this is a different story. In enterprise environments, it may be imprudent to break completely from the on-premises past and present. As is always the case, diligent enterprise organizations must survey the market and take a holistic approach that deals with their data needs in totality.

CockroachDB was designed to be the open source database our founders wanted to use. It delivers consistent, scalable SQL in a distributed environment. Developers often have questions about how we've achieved this, and our short answer is this: Distributed SQL. Our long answer requires a deeper understanding of CockroachDB’s unique architecture.

Last year the BulkIO team at Cockroach Labs replaced the implementation of our IMPORT bulk-loading feature with a simpler and faster data ingestion pipeline. In most of our tests, it looked like a major improvement: the release notes for CockroachDB v19.2 touted "4x faster" IMPORT. Many a 🎉 reaction was clicked, and the team moved on to new projects. But over the following months, it became clear we had celebrated too soon: we started to get reports of some IMPORTs that, instead of being faster, were much slower or even getting stuck. Armed with a test that could reproduce such a case, we started to dig.

Even before the stay-at-home orders spiked the demand for digital learning platforms, MyMahi was architecting for scale. MyMahi, a New Zealand-based digital education company, built their student platform, which helps 8,000+ monthly active students track their learning journeys, with CockroachDB Core embedded in a technology stack that includes spot instances (e.g., AWS Fargate), serverless functions (e.g., AWS Lambda), and GraphQL (e.g., GraphQL.js, GraphQL Tools). Starting in 2018, MyMahi designed their new application to take advantage of technologies that allow them to scale out seamlessly in response to student activity. In this blog post, we'll highlight MyMahi’s application architecture and discuss how different technologies like AWS Lambda interact with CockroachDB to provide a scalable, serverless backend for their application.

Cockroach Labs is proud to participate in DigitalOcean’s annual Hacktoberfest, a celebration of open source and community innovation. The month-long event encourages everyone from experienced developers to students and code newbies to make positive contributions to an ever-growing community. All backgrounds and skill levels are encouraged to complete the challenge. Once a hacker submits four high-quality pull requests, they receive a custom t-shirt from DigitalOcean.