Product

Whether you’re a developer or operator, we want to give you the observability tools you need to monitor your CockroachDB cluster. This includes standard tools such as logs, metrics like Prometheus and health endpoints, and alerting. But modern observability requires more than just the standard tools.

Andy Woods

January 26, 2021

It’s 2021 and the in-store shopping experience is still on pause with many stores shutting their doors forever. Online shopping is no longer the future of retail, but the new reality of retail. On average, ecommerce sales grew 32.4% year-over-year with some retailers (Best Buy, Target) seeing over 100% growth. 2020 forced retailers to rethink the way they do business and the way they reach their customers. Smaller businesses were forced to take their sales online, while larger businesses needed to find new, creative ways to stay ahead of the growing ecommerce competition. Organizations that have the bandwidth and the money to build data-intensive applications are changing the customer experience. They offer extremely personalized applications and doubled down on targeted advertising. With so much competition online, if you don’t innovate your business to meet the status-quo, you will struggle to survive. Looking ahead, how will this new “digital shopping experience” affect your bottom line? Will you acquire as many customers this year without the physical experience? Will you be able to expand your online services to new audiences? In the era of COVID-19, to reach your revenue goals it’s important to have the ability to scale your business and reach new customers regardless of where they are located. In this post, we will cover three strategies retailers can take to ensure they meet their revenue goals this year.

Cassie McAllister

January 25, 2021

The 2021 Cloud Report stands on benchmarks. Now in its third year, our report is more precise than ever, capturing an evaluation of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that tells realistic and universal performance stories on behalf of mission-critical OLTP applications.

One of the main reasons our customers choose CockroachDB is the easy horizontal scalability it offers, while maintaining data consistency with serializable isolation. This combination lets customers run critical OLTP workloads, like financial ledgers and e-commerce shopping carts, at large scale without the hassle of legacy sharding. With every release, we make significant investments in improving CockroachDB’s performance and scale. We measure CockroachDB’s performance through many diverse tests, including the industry-standard TPC-C benchmark to track our progress across releases. Our latest version, CockroachDB 20.2, passed 140K warehouses with a maximum throughput of 1.7M transactions per minute (tpmC) on TPC-C. This represents a 40% improvement with the same resources as compared to the results previously reported with CockroachDB 19.2 in this post. Additionally, CockroachDB 20.2 was able to load TPC-C 140K in less than 3 hours compared to the ~20 hours it took to load TPC-C 100K in 19.2. This improvement was the result of faster bulk-data loading, which built upon work in Pebble, CockroachDB’s new storage engine.

How is Lyft able to tell you how far away your driver is? How does DoorDash give accurate estimates for the food you just ordered? Both of these satisfying user experiences are possible because of spatial data. In this blog we’ll cover the basics of spatial data and then show some examples of common applications and use cases that use spatial data.

Dan Kelly

November 18, 2020

Here at Cockroach Labs, we want to arm you with tools you need to build better products, deliver better customer experiences, and maybe even create the next billion-dollar idea. Our goal with CockroachDB is to make it easier for any and every developer to deliver data-intensive applications, allowing them to easily take advantage of high availability and elastic scale. With our latest release, CockroachDB 20.2, we have added updates to make developers even more productive with a broader range of workloads. We’ve also continued to improve the security and management capabilities of the database and, as always, have made considerable improvements to the performance of CockroachDB. With this release we are also incredibly happy to note that the majority of these new capabilities are available in our free option, CockroachDB Core.

Meagan Goldman

November 10, 2020

In last week's episode of The Cockroach Hour, Jim Walker chatted with Cockroach Labs PMs Piyush Singh and Tommy Truongchau, along with security lead Aaron Blum, to talk about security features in CockroachDB. The full video is available here, and the transcript is below.

CockroachDB is a Distributed SQL database. That means for the person doing the querying, everything looks like the SQL they’ve known for years. But under the hood, there’s a lot more going on. In order to achieve the bulletproof resiliency and elastic scalability CockroachDB delivers, data is replicated and geographically distributed across nodes of a cluster, and read and write requests are automatically routed between nodes as appropriate. Replication and geo-distribution mean that your nodes have a shape--a topology--and how you design that topology allows you to make important tradeoffs regarding latency and resilience.

There’s a new paradigm in the database industry: Databases-as-a-Service. With their inherent advantages in elasticity, cost of ownership, and provisioning flexibility, the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) model is quickly becoming the easy choice for small companies and startups. But in enterprise environments, navigating a paradigm shift like this is a different story. In enterprise environments, it may be imprudent to break completely from the on-premises past and present. As is always the case, diligent enterprise organizations must survey the market and take a holistic approach that deals with their data needs in totality.