Product

Engineers on cloud performance teams can spend their entire workday tuning and optimizing cloud configurations. We caught up with Steve Dietz, a Google software engineer focused on Google Cloud performance, to get advice on how to performance tune, provision, and benchmark Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Jessica Edwards

April 1, 2021

We are excited to share that Fundamentals of CockroachDB for Java Developers is now available on Cockroach University. This course is designed for Java application developers who are looking to advance their education with CockroachDB and build scalable, resilient applications and services. This is our third course offering following the inaugural Getting Started course and Fundamentals of CockroachDB for Python Developers. Similar to the Python course, you will build a full-stack-ride sharing application, but in Java using Spring Boot with Spring Data JPA.

Driven by a new breed of fintech applications, financial services organizations look to the cloud for infrastructure that is always-on, resilient, and able to support the real-time processing of transactions. In this post, we investigate how these organizations can deliver peak performance while ensuring compliance with local data protection and privacy laws. As Facebook and Google, and new-age fintech apps like Betterment and Robinhood, have driven consumers to expect feature-rich applications, every business needs to be concerned with performance. While this remains a top priority for financial services organizations, another component unique to the banking industry needs to be top of mind – keeping latency low. Another significant benefit of cloud-native applications for banks is that they can support very high volumes of transactions with low latency.

Jessica Edwards

March 26, 2021

The current mentorship model is broken. It requires you to have the privilege of belonging to an established network (like a renowned university) or ‘cold call’ potential mentors on a platform like LinkedIn. Even after you find a mentor, it’s difficult to sustain a mentor-mentee connection. This is the challenge a group of students from Lassonde School of Engineering at York University set out to resolve through their Hack the North 2020++ app: mntr.tech

Amruta Ranade

March 19, 2021

Seven years ago, Spencer Kimball made the first commit to the CockroachDB — an open source project he had started with Ben Darnell and Peter Mattis:  Over the years, the project grew in popularity and so did the number of contributors. In 2015, Spencer, Ben, and Peter cofounded a for-profit company around the project — Cockroach Labs. As a for-profit business, we consider it our responsibility to financially support the open source developers and maintainers who help us build a healthy ecosystem of tools and libraries that work with CockroachDB. Cockroach Labs proudly sponsors the following maintainers who help us make CockroachDB the most evolved database on the planet (presented in reverse alphabetical order to liven things up).

Amruta Ranade

March 18, 2021

Many databases -- including Amazon Aurora and CockroachDB -- claim to be "global." While there is no official definition of the term "global database", it deserves to be unpacked. For those who prefer to watch or listen, we explore Aurora's architecture in depth during this webinar: "CockroachDB vs Amazon Aurora: Battle of the Cloud Databases". ### What is a global database? A global database promises global capabilities. At a bare minimum, it should satisfy these three requirements:

Jim Walker

March 17, 2021

Batch data sucks — it’s slow, manual, cumbersome, and often stale. We know because we’ve dealt with these problems ourselves. Any business needs to track metrics, from customer activity to the internal workings of the company. But how can we keep those metrics up to date to extract maximum business value? Here at Cockroach Labs we build CockroachDB, a distributed database meant to survive everything and thrive everywhere. CockroachDB is primarily optimized for transactional- “OLTP”- data, and sometimes it is advantageous to stream that data to an analytical warehouse to run frequent, large queries. That’s what we do with our “telemetry data” — the data we collect internally on product usage.

The CockroachDB Docs site is home to our product documentation for CockroachDB and CockroachDB Dedicated, our two product offerings. It includes reference documentation, conceptual documentation, developer guides, tutorials, and much more. Cockroach Labs has always prioritized its documentation, investing in it from very early in the company’s existence. We believe clear, concise, and helpful docs are important in enabling our users to be self-sufficient in testing, deploying, and interacting with our products. They’re an important tool that internal users, such as Support and Sales, also reference. Each document goes through a thorough research, draft, and review process– and while our Docs team owns the process, it’s a collaborative effort. Many times, a cross-functional group made up of engineers, product managers, designers, customer success– even members from our community!– will contribute.

Innovative fintech organizations built from the ground up to be agile, data-driven, and cloud-native are driving traditional banks and financial services organizations to adopt cloud-native infrastructure. In order to remain competitive and relevant, banks are modernizing operations, replacing legacy systems like Oracle, IBM DB2, and others. Moreover, to keep pace with fintech organizations, banks are turning to the cloud.

Jessica Edwards

February 25, 2021