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Databases are evolving. For the past decade, we’ve read thinkpiece after thinkpiece taking firm stances on the “SQL vs. NoSQL” debate--some of which declaratively pronounce the death of SQL or the death of NoSQL. In DZone’s annual report on SQL v NoSQL database usage, we’re excited to see that we’re moving beyond that paradigm. What we’re seeing in this report is more nuanced, and a lot more exciting: the death of the “SQL vs. NoSQL” binary altogether.

The other week, we devoted an episode of The Cockroach Hour to talk about the dirty secret of isolation levels. When host Jim Walker was titling the webinar, I’m pretty sure he had one particular “secret” in mind: dirty reads. But the conversation kicked off with discussion of an even more pervasive secret: most developers don’t pay attention to isolation levels. Guests Tim Veil and John Sheaffer, both Solutions Engineers at Cockroach Labs, have decades of experience developing against and working with–and for–all sorts of databases. And both of them admitted that for years, they weren’t paying enough attention to what was happening with their applications' consistency models and isolation levels.

In this post, I’ll skim the surface of a very common pattern in application development: full text indexing and search. I’ll start with a bit of motivation, what prompted me to explore this using CockroachDB. Next, I’ll introduce the initial pass at a solution, followed by a deeper explanation of how that was done, and I’ll then improve on that result by adding a “score”. Finally, I’ll discuss the limitations of this simplistic approach, within the context of information retrieval, ending with my answer to “So, why’d you do it?” Let’s get started.

Michael Goddard

August 27, 2020

As a startup, our policies and processes constantly evolve. All content in this post is true at the time of publication. For the most up-to-date information, please visit our careers page or reach out to recruiting@cockroachlabs.com.

There are many reasons you might want to alter the schema of your database but in many databases, this process typically requires downtime. In CockroachDB, we have supported online schema changes since our first stable release, and in v20.1, we added the ability to alter primary keys while in production without downtime.

Today marks the 99th anniversary of the birth of Edgar F. Codd, the author of “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” and godfather of the relational database. Ted Codd did for the database what Xerox PARC did for personal computers: made them accessible to everyday humans. Long before the invention of computers, there were databases. As early as 2400 BC the ancient Sumerians were carving tablets recording medical prescriptions for different ailments. Lists of Roman citizens on parchment scrolls. Card catalogs. Rolodexes. Even after computers were invented, data was far from automated. Early database models used a “flat file” system – a simple consecutive list of records that required the computer to begin at the start of the list and search sequentially. A very slow way to search, add to, and maintain large volumes of records. Meanwhile, we had a moon to get to! Humanity needed a way to access and interact with data in a fast, efficient, and accurate way.

Michelle Gienow

August 19, 2020

As a startup, our policies and processes constantly evolve. All content in this post is true at the time of publication. For the most up-to-date information, please visit our careers page or reach out to recruiting@cockroachlabs.com Adjusting to a completely remote lifestyle to weather a pandemic has been no easy feat. For many of us, maintaining productivity has been even harder. Cockroach Labs is working hard to ensure that our people have what they need to take care of themselves and work effectively, no matter where they are. Our company was founded with a belief in establishing balance and flexibility at the core of our organizational philosophy. We say so proudly on our careers website: “We care about productivity, not face time.” This principle has driven how we put best practices in place surrounding remote work, asynchronous communication, and relocating throughout your career with us. We’re particularly proud of how this commitment has smoothed the quick transition to company-wide remote work at the height of COVID-19’s spread. Our foremost goal at the start of the pandemic was (and remains) to make sure that our team is safe and practicing vital social distancing measures. From our founding in 2015, most of our early team was based in New York City. Over time, as we began to hire Roachers in metro regions throughout the US, we spun up co-working spaces in those new cities. Later, we did the same in Toronto to bring our past interns from Canada on board! Opening these offices meant welcoming more talent from more parts of the world and we’re happy to do so. As we’ve expanded our sales team, we’ve started hiring for revenue roles in the UK, too. We will continue to evaluate new regions as we grow, but we’ve confirmed an important hypothesis: a scaling workforce can still build the world’s best distributed database.

From our enterprise customers to developer shops, a lot of folks use CockroachDB to back their Spring applications. It’s no surprise; Java is the most widely used programming language in the world, running in over 3 billion devices. And no matter what kind of application you’re running, the Spring ecosystem provides different data access patterns depending on your needs. We’ve recently added tutorials for a number of Spring data access patterns: Spring Data JDBC, Spring Data JPA, and MyBatis. Check them out below.

Meagan Goldman

August 10, 2020

This past February, before the pandemic was deemed a pandemic and New York City was still humming along, as usual, I sat down at Cockroach Labs HQ to talk about the future of data in application development. It’s a broad topic and one that’s about to undergo a fundamental and immutable shift. We’ll get to why in just a minute.

Spencer Kimball

August 3, 2020