Product

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

he thought of developing a solution for “epidemic management” was not what Quarano engineers had in mind this time last year. In fact, Quarano’s story started just a few months ago at a government-sponsored hackathon in Germany. At the hackathon, over 40,000+ participants were asked to build applications and services to help manage and decrease the spread of COVID-19.

Cassie McAllister

February 23, 2021

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there has been a massive traffic spike in everything digital--from online shopping to remote learning. Under the hood, companies responsible for these technologies have had to quickly adapt to handle the growth in users. Having an elastically scalable and cloud-native stack--all the way down to the database--has helped ease this transition. One such company that experienced a pandemic-driven surge in popularity was UNIwise, an education tech company based in Denmark that sells an online test platform called WISEflow.

Dan Kelly

February 19, 2021

CockroachDB empowers developers to build fast, scalable applications, and one of the ways it does this is by providing rich, Postgres-compatible SQL. And while CockroachDB follows the Postgres wire protocol, the database also has a custom SQL implementation designed for a distributed database. Over the years, we’ve expanded our distributed SQL implementation to include a cost-based optimizer (CBO) and vectorized execution engine - all built to tackle the complexity of distributed data for developers. In CockroachDB 20.2, we’re excited to provide developers with an increasingly rich SQL feature set that includes support for spatial data, materialized views, Enums, ALTER TABLE, and user-defined schema changes. Let’s dive into the new capabilities.

CockroachDB is designed to deliver bulletproof resilience. But even the world’s safest boat needs to carry life jackets. The same principle applies to your data, which is why we’ve baked a breadth of Backup and Restore capabilities into CockroachDB.

A global financial data firm migrated off its legacy Oracle infrastructure, creating a single hybrid, geo-partitioned deployment of CockroachDB. Frustrated by its legacy Oracle database architecture, a major American financial data firm wanted to consolidate its legacy databases and migrate to public cloud infrastructure.

Jessica Edwards

February 8, 2021