Engineering

The latest research paper from CockroachDB’s engineering team, “A Demonstration of Multi-Region CockroachDB”, will appear in the Demonstration Track of the VLDB 2022 conference in Sydney, Australia (as well as remotely), on September 5-9. This paper complements our recent full paper, Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB, which appeared earlier this year in SIGMOD 2022.

Indexes are a crucial part of your database schema. They improve workload performance by helping the database locate data without having to scan every row of a table. Although it might be tempting to create an index for every column that your workload uses to filter data, it’s important to consider the performance tradeoffs of indexes. While indexes greatly improve the performance of read queries that use filters, they do come with a cost to write performance: data has to be written for all indexes present on the table.

Marylia Gutierrez

August 23, 2022

Observability is how you understand the current state of your database: how it is behaving, plus any potentially problematic things you should be paying attention to — and identifying improvements based on this information.

Marylia Gutierrez

August 1, 2022

Cockroaches first evolved more than 300M years ago, and yet the O.G. is still recognizable. "Modern" cockroaches are about 200M years old; that they're still with us, largely unchanged, is quite impressive from an evolutionary perspective.

Spencer Kimball

May 20, 2022

*Note: This blog was originally published in 2017. Everything is still true today. It is being updated to include additional capabilities in CockroachDB. Namely, bounded staleness reads. The CAP theorem is a fundamental part of the theory of distributed systems. It states that in the presence of partitions (i.e. network failures), a system cannot be both consistent and available, and must choose one of the two.

Ben Darnell

May 5, 2022

3 basic rules for choosing indexes There are a few basic rules to keep in mind when choosing indexes for a database. A good index should have these three properties: Usefulness: Speed up the execution of some queries (or enforce a constraint) Clustering: Keep records that are likely to be accessed together near each other Scattering: Keep records that are unlikely to be accessed together far apart

Ben Darnell

May 3, 2022

A recent tweet inspired me to address the need for fuzzy matching by combining some existing capabilities of CockroachDB. Note the key features mentioned in the tweet: - similar but not equal sporting events names: a common pattern. Users tend to mis-type data in input fields, and data isn’t always correct. Nevertheless, we’d like to return the closest match. - I’d rather use this in-built feature than pay for a whole ES cluster with added maintenance overhead to boot: This is the second time I’ve heard this sentiment in the past couple of months. ES is a full-featured search engine and delivers a great experience but, for this purpose, would be overkill and would require additional time and expense to deploy and operate.

Michael Goddard

April 18, 2022

Syndication from What Does Write Skew Look Like by Justin Jaffray This post is about gaining intuition for Write Skew, and, by extension, Snapshot Isolation. Snapshot Isolation is billed as a transaction isolation level that offers a good mix between performance and correctness, but the precise meaning of “correctness” here is often vague. In this post I want to break down and capture exactly when the thing called “write skew” can happen.

What does a Test Engineer do? The Test Engineering team (TestEng) is a new and exciting team embedded within Engineering. We are accomplished engineers on a quest for higher quality. Collectively, we have built complex and impressive software systems at startups and big tech, written test frameworks and program analysis tools; and even applied formal verification and automated reasoning. We have done all of those things and more while obsessing about correctness and performance, yet never quite achieving nirvana.