Product

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.

CockroachDB was designed to be the open source database our founders wanted to use. It delivers consistent, scalable SQL in a distributed environment. Developers often have questions about how we've achieved this, and our short answer is this: Distributed SQL. Our long answer requires a deeper understanding of CockroachDB’s unique architecture.

Simulating a CockroachDB cluster can be an incredibly useful tool for testing, training, and development work. It's an easy process that you can perform directly on localhost using Docker. Today's blog post is a tutorial by Cockroach Labs enterprise architect Fabio Ghirardello on how to simulate a multi-region CockroachDB cluster on localhost.

Today, we are excited to introduce our second Cockroach University course: CockroachDB for Python Developers. This course is designed for application developers looking to advance their education with CockroachDB and learn how to build scalable, resilient applications and services. Similar to our inaugural Getting Started course, this free course includes a series of videos, exercises, and a final exam. However, this course is much more hands-on. You will build a full-stack vehicle-sharing application called MovR in Python using the popular SQLAlchemy ORM. Our goal is for students to walk away from this course feeling confident in building fully-functional applications with CockroachDB.

upper/db is a data access layer written in Go with ORM-like features. It's compatible with PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, and now, CockroachDB! I am very pleased to announce that our CockroachDB adapter is now in beta and ready to be used!