Product

When new technologies arise we first adopt them for their technical value. If that value proves out, then we reach the magic “crossing the chasm” moment: when a technology jumps to widespread adoption through proven business value and goes mainstream. Some technologies, a very select few, make one more jump forward, however — from mainstream to existential imperative.

Michelle Gienow

September 22, 2022

When we set out to build a better relational database seven years ago, we envisioned a solution that was scalable, highly available, and always consistent, because as we said then, “we’d rather spend time quickly building and iterating products, not engineering solutions to database shortcomings.” Today, after developing a database that delivers those capabilities and has been battle-tested by thousands of customers, we’re still following the same northstar. But we’ve extended that vision.

Nate Stewart

September 21, 2022

Identifying transaction bottlenecks or getting an audit trail of user actions in the database can be challenging without self-service observability. Often, the only way to access cluster logs is to request them from technical support, which is painfully inefficient. If a particular set of SQL queries from an application is taking more time to execute than anticipated, not having timely access to logs to help troubleshoot slow query performance could mean end users suffering an inferior experience for longer than desired and the application team not being able to adhere to their SLA / SLO. And if the InfoSec team needs real-time information to identify which users are accessing confidential data fields in tables with sensitive data, going through the support team can hamper appropriate auditability. CockroachDB now makes it possible to export your CockroachDB Dedicated logs to your AWS Cloudwatch or GCP Cloud Logging instances. You can collect and visualize cluster logs directly in those cloud-native services, and from there optionally send them to other third-party Observability platforms for centralized monitoring. You can do all this on your own. No technical support required.

Very few traditions can melt the corporate ice as well as an ugly holiday sweater contest. Which is why, this past December, I took on the challenge of building an Ugly Sweater Voting Application to entertain our 100% distributed team. The application (which can be used to vote on any images - not just ugly sweaters) consists of a dashboard that displays the status of the contest and a serverless backend that facilitates bootstrapping the dashboard and handling updates from SMS messages using websockets. The results of the contest were…ugly! (Aside from our CEO, of course, who somehow wore an ugly sweater but made it fashion.)

Aydrian Howard

September 14, 2022

While many companies have long since moved their application data and analytics data into the cloud, operational data has lagged a bit behind. There are a variety of reasons for this, but a primary one is that operational data is often both sensitive (containing PII) and mission-critical. Many companies are hesitant to fix something that, from their perspective, has not been broken, and hesitant to put critical data into the hands of people outside the company. This mindset is changing fast, though. While the old model may not be fully broken for everyone, it is breaking. For one thing, in 2022 the old way has simply become too expensive. And managed cloud database options are maturing, addressing some of the performance and security concerns that early adopters once had about them.

Charlie Custer

September 13, 2022

I’m often asked by developers how they can squeeze the most performance out of their database. While there are other SQL performance best practices to consider, by far the easiest (and biggest) performance improvement comes from good use of indexes. I’ll break this down into two categories: (1), knowing what’s possible, and (2) knowing what you’re actually getting.

There are occasions in which businesses need their database to fit into unusual production environments for specific use cases. In this blog, we’ll push the boundaries and test whether CockroachDB can work and thrive in new and unusual places, such as: • On an IBM Mainframe • On an ARM64 CPU

Jeffrey White

August 30, 2022

Running a geographically distributed database has a lot of benefits. We see enterprise companies, startups, and students choose distributed databases for reliability, scalability, and even security. But many distributed databases come at a serious cost: latency. Distributing nodes across the globe means your data will need to travel from one node to the other. By its very definition, distribution creates latency. Geo-partitioning your data in CockroachDB makes it easy to minimize that latency. We believe you shouldn’t have to sacrifice the benefits of a distributed database to achieve impressive throughput and low latency. With geo-partitioning, we can minimize latency by minimizing the distance between where SQL queries are issued and where the data to satisfy those queries resides.

The details in this post are based on The Netflix Tech Blog post titled “Towards a Reliable Device Management Platform”. The Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry is extremely profitable – it has raked in billions of dollars each year for the last several years. The U.S. M&E industry is the largest in the world, valued at $660 billion (of the $2 trillion global market) despite seeing a 7.3% year-on-year decline in 2020 due to the pandemic. While the pandemic accelerated existing trends (i.e. the streaming subscription model), it halted others (i.e. box office sales). Many M&E companies had to pivot their business model to stay competitive. For example, we saw several studios release first-run movies directly to streaming services, which allowed them to expand to an even larger audience. The M&E industry is on the rebound from 2020, and major players are figuring out new ways to build relationships with customers that last years, not weeks. One thing that’s been clear is the importance of creating an agile business model that allows you to iterate on new ideas and quickly adapt to market changes driven by customer demands.

Cassie McAllister

August 18, 2022