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For many people, interactions in the workplace and connections between coworkers are deeply important to overall wellbeing. We learned in the early days of Cockroach Labs that expressing gratitude and praise for the good work of our peers was deeply important to our culture, and that there existed a desire to acknowledge and appreciate each other publicly. This developed into what we call “peer acks”, short for peer acknowledgments, a forum for celebrating the good work of our peers.

Jessica Edwards

November 27, 2019

At Cockroach Labs, we write quite a bit about consensus algorithms. They are a critical component of CockroachDB and we rely on them in the lower layers of our transactional, scalable, distributed key-value store. In fact, large clusters can contain tens of thousands of consensus groups because in CockroachDB, every Range (similar to a shard) is an independent consensus group. Under the hood, we run a large number of instances of Raft (a consensus algorithm), which has come with interesting engineering challenges. This post dives into one that we’ve tackled recently: adding support for atomic replication changes (“Joint Quorums”) to etcd/raft and using them in CockroachDB to improve resilience against region failures.

Last week, we launched Cockroach University with our first course, Getting Started with CockroachDB. Our goal in building this was to provide a way for people to learn CockroachDB in an engaging and structured environment with lots of opportunities for hands-on practice, as well as a chance to show off what they’ve done. We included a graded final exam, and those who pass will receive a Certificate of Completion.

Yugabyte frequently compares themselves to CockroachDB. We investigated their claims. This is our analysis of CockroachDB vs. Yugabyte v2.0.0.

Peter Mattis

November 19, 2019

Today, we’re proud to announce the release of CockroachDB 19.2, which significantly improves the latency, reliability, and usability of CockroachDB. CockroachDB 19.2 pushes the bounds of what a distributed SQL database can do. We’re bringing the latency of distributed transactions closer to the theoretical minimum, continuing to bolster the resilience and reliability of our enterprise and open core product, and we’re making CockroachDB easier to use than ever before. Not only does 19.2 introduce new features for better ease-of-use, we’re also launching Cockroach University to improve the experience of learning and using the product. Cockroach University is a free online learning tool for developers and architects who want to gain a fundamental understanding of distributed databases and deep knowledge of CockroachDB’s functionality and architecture.

Distributed ACID transactions form the beating heart of CockroachDB. They allow users to manipulate any and all of their data transactionally, no matter where it physically resides. Distributed transactions are so important to CockroachDB’s goal to “Make Data Easy” that we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make them as fast as possible. Specifically, CockroachDB specializes in globally distributed deployments, so we put a lot of effort into optimizing CockroachDB’s transaction protocol for clusters with high inter-node latencies.

Following his keynote on the big stage at ESCAPE/19 Armon Dadger, CTO and Co-Founder of HashiCorp, sat down with John Furrier of The Cube and said, “If you had this exact same conference 3 or 4 years ago everyone would’ve been like, what Multi-Cloud? Multi-Cloud is not real. And now nobody questions the premise. They’re like, ‘obviously we’re going to be multi-cloud.’” The inevitability of multi-cloud permeated the speaking sessions at ESCAPE/19 - the inaugural Multi-Cloud Conference hosted in downtown NYC. Technologists demo’d software to navigate the storage, networking, and compute challenges of multi-cloud. Business leaders took the stage to confront the price of multi-cloud deployments, the importance of moving data closer to users, and the business value of multiple vendors.

Dan Kelly

November 5, 2019

CockroachDB is an OLTP database, specialized for serving high-throughput queries that read or write a small number of rows. As we gained more usage, we found that customers weren’t getting the performance they expected from analytic queries that read a lot of rows, like large scans, joins, or aggregations. In April 2018, we started to seriously investigate how to improve the performance of these types of queries in CockroachDB, and began working on a new SQL execution engine. In this blog post, we use example code to discuss how we built the new engine and why it results in up to a 4x speed improvement on an industry-standard benchmark.

Today we announced the beta program for CockroachDB Dedicated, a self-service, fully managed cloud offering of CockroachDB. CockroachDB Dedicated delivers simple and easy to onboard distributed SQL, while also offering a secure and flexible experience. Whether you’re building a small application on a single node, a resilient application across multiple nodes or a multi-region application serving users all over the world, CockroachDB Dedicated is the distributed SQL database for modern application developers. “As-a-service” has become the norm for how developers consume software. A year ago, we announced a limited availability of Managed CockroachDB, which was the first step in our cloud journey, and an important milestone in our mission of Making Data Easy. Since then, we’ve learned a lot from our earliest users. CockroachDB Dedicated is the culmination of all those learnings, and we’re excited to now open up the offering to a broader audience.

Lakshmi Kannan

October 16, 2019