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We think CockroachDB is a great database for many people, and want them to try us out. Not just for new applications, but for existing, large applications as well. The first problem that users with an existing database will hit when trying us out for the first time is getting their data into CockroachDB. For the 1.1 release, we built a new feature that performs high-speed, bulk data import. It works by transforming CSV files into our backup/restore format, then is able to quickly ingest the results.

Some of my colleagues have children to tend to after work and many are night owls who are most productive during the wee hours while I’m drooling in my sleep. While I’m trying to figure out how to best work with them, they’re also trying to figure out how to work with me. Is it okay to send me Slack messages after 7pm? What is the best way to give me constructive feedback?

We are excited to announce a partnership with Kindred Futures to build the next generation global online gaming platform for their parent company Kindred Group plc. Kindred is a rapidly growing, global business with strict data privacy and technical requirements. Their ambitious project to build a global online gaming platform with multiple active data centers that span continents is an exciting opportunity for our team. Furthermore, the close collaboration between our engineering teams is helping to shape the development of CockroachDB, starting with a design partnership for a geo-partitioning feature planned for the 1.2 release.

Jessica Edwards

October 16, 2017

Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of CockroachDB 1.1. We’ve spent the last five months incorporating feedback from our customers and community, and making improvements that will help even more teams move to CockroachDB. We are also excited to share success stories from a few of our customers. Baidu, one the world’s largest internet companies, shares how they are using CockroachDB to automate operations for applications that process 50M inserts and 2 TB of data daily. Heroic Labs, a software startup, shares how they simplified deployment of their gaming platform-as-a-service by packaging CockroachDB inside each server. CockroachDB 1.1 focuses on three areas: seamless migration from legacy databases, simplified cluster management, and improved performance in real-world environments.

Nate Stewart

October 12, 2017

Hackathons are––for the uninitiated––a little insane, and HTN one of the craziest among them. 1,000 students from all across the globe (literally!) descend on Waterloo, Ontario for a 36-contiguous-hour event to build a team and create interesting software. While students might be motivated by prizes awarded in cash, pride, swag, and lucrative employment opportunities––it feels like most of all, students are eager to learn about new technologies and show what they can do in a day and a half.

A modern distributed database should do more than just split data amongst a number of servers; it should correctly manage partitions (or shards). Moreso, it should automatically detect failures, fix itself without any operator intervention, and completely abstract this management from the end user. This post is the first in a series on how CockroachDB handles its data and discusses the mechanisms it uses to rebalance and repair. These systems make managing a CockroachDB cluster significantly easier than managing other databases.

As businesses outsource their infrastructure to public cloud providers they are in turn taking on major risks. In a recent piece by Financial News (gated), senior executives at Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered warned that an overreliance on a small band of cloud service providers could result in a major hack or outage wreaking havoc on the global banking system. Lock-in is a global issue: Bain’s Cloud Computing Survey noted that the share of respondents citing vendor lock-in as a “top three concern” grew from 7% to 23% from 2012 to 2015. Of course, cloud vendor lock-in issues extend beyond uptime risk; they also include the regulatory risk of changes in data sovereignty policies or the financial risk of having to endure price hikes without any negotiating power; Dropbox went so far as to migrate off of AWS and onto their own system to get control of their costs.

Nate Stewart

October 3, 2017

CockroachDB makes data easier to manage by providing a strongly-consistent, highly-scalable, SQL interface that you can trust to be there when you need it. We’ve designed it to be a truly cloud-native, distributed SQL database that’s easy to operate in any environment you throw at it. One such computing environment that has grown in popularity over the previous few years is Mesosphere’s DC/OS, a datacenter operating system built on top of Apache Mesos. DC/OS is an orchestration system for deploying and managing distributed applications across a cluster of machines as if they were a single pool of resources. DC/OS has both an open source and an enterprise version that gives you the ability to elastically scale your infrastructure on prem or in the cloud. It provides scheduling, resource allocation, service discovery, automatic recovery from failure, load balancing, and more, all with the goal of making it easier to manage your applications.

Alex Robinson

September 28, 2017