Product

Last week, while running a workload consisting of 200 different queries, we noticed right away that a CPU imbalance was causing a performance issue. Looking at the first graph, below, you can see right away that one of the three CockroachDB nodes was operating at near 100% CPU. Not ideal.

Michael Goddard

May 23, 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

Welcome! If you find yourself here wondering What does “serverless database" even mean? you may want to start with Andy Kimball’s introduction to serverless architecture post before coming back to dive in with us here. On the flip side, if you’re already thinking How ARE you running a serverless database on Kubernetes? Sometimes, my deployments take 10 minutes to fully roll out and my eyes are fully-featured YAML parsers. Theytoldmethiswouldbebetter! — you’ve come to the right blog post.

Everyone here at Cockroach Labs is thrilled about the publication of our very own O’Reilly tome, CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide. Seriously delighted — as in, just-found-out-the-rest-of-today’s-meetings-are-all-canceled level of happiness. We are beyond proud to have our own hefty tech book with an iconic animal on the cover. (Or, even better, iconic insect on the cover since the fine folks at O’Reilly Media agreed to let us have a cockroach on ours). Most of all, we are delighted to have the complete workings of CockroachDB collected in a single, thorough and hands-on resource to help make distributed SQL accessible to even more users. This is thanks in large part due to Guy Harrison, who is quite literally The Guy Who Wrote The Book On CockroachDB. Guy co-authored the Definitive Guide with Cockroach Labs co-founder and chief architect, Ben Darnell, and our head of education, Jesse Seldess. “Guy’s deep existing database knowledge paired with his diligence in learning Cockroach just as deeply contributed immeasurably to the scope and thoroughness of the book,” Ben commented.

Michelle Gienow

May 10, 2022

When you’re standing up a quick prototype of a web application, you probably don’t think much about how your database will scale. But in the long run, scale matters. And while scaling and deploying a highly available relational database used to be both expensive and challenging, today it’s pretty straightforward and completely free. There’s really no reason not to start with a database that’ll scale automatically.

Charlie Custer

May 9, 2022

CockroachDB helps small to large organizations manage their transactional data at global scale, with high-availability, while providing multi-cloud & hybrid disaster proofing capabilities. Many of those customers trust CockroachDB to store PII or organizationally sensitive data, and they secure it with native data security capabilities in the product. But there are some needs that require reimagination of how one looks at data security at different kinds of scale - across different business units or teams, across multiple CockroachDB clusters, or across multiple types of data stores including OLTP and OLAP.

If you use a database, at some point you’ll need to modify your schema design. Maybe you need to store new kinds of information. Perhaps you’ll add a field to a table or even need to change a primary key. Regardless of the reason, application requirements tend to change over time - and you’ll need to migrate. We know how important schema modification is, which is why we’ve built zero-downtime online schema changes and online primary key changes into CockroachDB.

Imagine walking into this: “About 4 million lines of PHP code, written by underpaid, sometimes not well meaning, freelancers and students over the span of 8 years. The CEO wrote a large part, but stopped learning new techniques around 2004.” That’s how bad tech debt can get when a startup is run without considering that all of those messy shortcuts will eventually have to get cleaned up.

Charlie Custer

March 22, 2022

When you’ve got a great idea for a startup, application architecture is probably one of the last things on your mind. But architecting your app right the first time can save you major headaches further down the road. So let’s take a look at a typical startup application architecture, with a particular focus on the database and how the choices that application architects make in that part of their stack can impact scale, user experience, and more.

Charlie Custer

March 16, 2022