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Many of our employees, customers, partners, and the communities where we work and live are hurting. The Black community in America has already suffered disproportionately from COVID-19 through illness and unemployment. Exacerbating this, we are extremely saddened by the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others across the United States. The murder of George Floyd has, again, highlighted the desperate need for police reform and racial justice in this country.

Spencer Kimball

June 4, 2020

Around 6 months ago, we launched Cockroach University to provide a way for people to learn CockroachDB in a structured environment with opportunities for hands-on experience. Since then, we have learned that it’s actually much more than that.

As of our 20.1 release, CockroachDB supports online primary key changes. This means that it is now possible to change the primary key of a table while performing read and write operations on the table. Online primary key changes make it easier to transition an application from being single-region to multi-region, or to iterate on the schema of an application with no down time. Let’s dive into the technical challenges behind this feature, and our approach to solving them. As part of the deep dive, let’s review how data is stored in CockroachDB, and how online schema changes work in CockroachDB.

The global pandemic has changed the way we live and work. Work-from-home has become the new normal. Web and application traffic patterns have been turned upside-down. These abrupt transitions have added stress not only to our daily lives but also to our infrastructure and business applications. In response to these dramatic shifts, Cockroach Labs is launching new programs to better support our fellow developers and the greater community of those affected by COVID-19.

Jessica Edwards

May 14, 2020

At Cockroach Labs, we want to give you a database that allows you to quickly and simply build and manage data-intensive applications in the cloud—without worrying about the performance, scale or resilience of those apps. To support that mission, our latest release includes updates that let you build fast and build to last.

I recently returned to work following three months of parental leave for the birth of my first child. I spent most of that time doing what you’d expect: staring at the baby for hours, changing hundreds of diapers, and generally alternating between unwarranted confidence and complete uncertainty. But I also found a little time for some other projects, and I’d like to share one of them today. We used an app called Baby Connect to track feedings, diapers, and other vital information about the baby (this is the app that got the coveted phone home screen real estate that was freed when I uninstalled Slack for my leave). I also had a Fitbit Versa 2 smartwatch, saw that it had an SDK, and decided to try building a custom watch face that would show this data.

Ben Darnell

May 8, 2020

Cockroach Labs was founded on a hypothesis: modern, cloud-native applications will need a new type of database built on a distributed architecture to provide bulletproof resilience and elastic, effortless scale, and we can deliver it. We’ve been humbled and encouraged to see validation of our hypothesis over the past four years, from buzz and feedback on Hacker News, to open source adoption, to Github stars. Since launching our commercial product in 2018, we’ve seen companies large and small (including Equifax, Bose, and Comcast) adopt CockroachDB as their database of choice for mission-critical applications. And in the last twelve months, we’ve seen our first-year customers on average more than double the size of their CockroachDB deployments.

My guiltiest pleasure right now is watching apocalypse films. It’s less escapism than it is catharsis, and there’s usually a happy ending (or at the very least---they have an ending). When you watch these apocalyptic movies, the audience is always focused on the hero, holding the door closed against some encroaching danger. Few people are paying attention to the guy in the corner of the room sitting with others, telling some wild story or caught in the middle of some elaborate joke, trying to get a smile out of people in crisis.

* As of CockroachDB 23.1 we no longer use the duplicate indexes topology pattern. Instead, we use global tables. When you’re distributing a SQL database geographically, it can be tough to get fast application performance. Data often has to make long, round trip journeys across the world and is restricted by a speed limit (the speed of light).

Piyush Singh

April 14, 2020