Product

In simple terms, a relational (SQL) database stores structured data that conforms to a predefined schema. A document-model (or NoSQL) database stores documents that may contain unstructured data without a schema. At least, that’s the way that these two database storage models have traditionally been discussed.

Jim Walker

July 7, 2022

One of the most interesting questions we get to dig into in our annual Cloud Report is which CPUs offer the best performance – and more importantly, the best price for performance – for large OLTP workloads. To answer that question (among others) we test dozens of instance types across the three major public clouds – AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Charlie Custer

June 29, 2022

What is metadata, exactly? Metadata is data about other data. That’s a very broad definition, though. When you start trying to get specific, it can get murky pretty quickly. In our experience with our customers, we see “metadata” commonly used to describe two different sorts of use cases

Charlie Custer

June 24, 2022

We depend on financial companies and services to help us navigate just about everything — to the point where they’re basically a form of critical infrastructure, at least existentially speaking. (Try to imagine getting through the rest of your day right now if your credit card froze or your financial services were suddenly unavailable. Do you have enough cash on you to buy lunch, or a ticket/tank of gas to drive home?). In such a complex and far-reaching sector, there are many ways things can go wrong. And, unfortunately, as your platform/application/services grow, the number of possible stress points scales right along with them.

Michelle Gienow

June 23, 2022

Over the past year, Cockroach Labs has been working hard to give our observability tooling some extra love. When it comes to monitoring our cloud products, such as CockroachDB Dedicated, meeting our customers where they are is one of our primary goals. Many organizations already have a platform in place to monitor their systems, and we’d like them to feel right at home when it comes to monitoring their CockroachDB cluster. But with so many platforms available in the ever-changing observability market today, like Datadog, Amazon CloudWatch, and more, how do we stay flexible in our observability tooling? The popular tools of today are not guaranteed to stand the test of time. Therefore, we need a platform for third party monitoring integrations that’s flexible enough to support both the platforms of today, as well as those of tomorrow. For Cockroach Labs, we chose the OpenTelemetry Collector to serve as such a platform and to integrate with Datadog as the first of what we hope to someday be a substantial library of third party integrations. This blog post discusses the capabilities of the OpenTelemetry Collector and how we introduced it into our cloud infrastructure.

For operators, architects and developers alike, data domiciling can be one tough technical nemesis. Privacy regulations like GDPR create strict requirements where data can live in the world. To meet these requirements companies traditionally had to run separate databases in different geographic regions. This results in a huge operational overhead and reliability also takes a hit, since it can be hard to guarantee region survival while complying with data domiciling restrictions.

Michelle Gienow

June 13, 2022

The 2022 Cloud Report is finally here, and we think it was worth the wait! In this completely free 70+ report, you’ll find the results of over 3,000 OLTP test runs analyzing 56 different instance types across AWS, GCP, and Azure for performance and price, as well as hundreds of additional runs benchmarking CPU performance, network latency and throughput, and storage. Want a little taste of what’s inside? For the first time ever, we saw machines with AMD chips eclipse Intel: instance types with the latest-gen AMD Milan CPUs took the top spots for both performance and price-for-performance in our OLTP benchmarking.

Charlie Custer

June 13, 2022

Let’s be real: while there’s nothing wrong with a nice GUI, doing things with the command line is just faster. At least once you know what you’re doing. That’s why in CockroachDB 22.1, we’ve added a new tool that’s designed to make it faster and easier than ever to create and manage CockroachDB clusters right from the command line: ccloud.

Charlie Custer

June 3, 2022

Have you ever wanted to stream data from your database without having to install additional resources that require more time and energy to maintain? Just recently, I spoke with a {person who shall remain nameless} about how they wanted to dump new data to a file, move it from one cloud provider to another, and then place it in storage for consumption by downstream systems. There was more to it and it hurt my head to listen. I had only one question for {person to remain nameless} “When did you start hating your fellow coworkers?” I mean, really… other people will have to maintain that mess.

Jeff Carlson

June 3, 2022