Product

Today we released a series of exciting updates to give you even more flexibility to run CockroachDB how you want, where you want, more efficiently than ever before. Customers often tell us they want the benefits of the cloud (elastic scale, consumption-based costs, operational ease of managed services, etc.), without the drawbacks of being locked-in to a single provider’s platform or proprietary services. We built CockroachDB from the beginning to maximize flexibility and control while still delivering the automation and efficiency we have all come to expect from cloud-native tools. The new capabilities we’ve made available today strengthen those values.

Meagan Goldman

May 16, 2023

Upserts are useful for anyone who works with a database to know, but the term “upsert” might not even appear in your DBMS’s documentation! So what is an upsert, anyway? And why might it not be mentioned in your docs?

Charlie Custer

May 8, 2023

When building a multi-region application, one of the first things to consider is how and where data will be placed. For example, when building a gambling application deployed across the country, you want to make sure users have quick access to their data no matter their location. Gamblers and the platforms they use both need low latency access to real-time data. It can make or break the user experience. This is an easy example because money is won and lost, but the requirement for applications to deliver low latency experiences to a global user base is obviously applicable to every other industry as well.

Would you fly in an aircraft that wasn’t tested? Get behind the wheel of a car whose model hadn’t been crash-tested? What about using a distributed database for storing your mission critical data that hadn’t been tested and gone through quality assurance? I’d happily wager that if you are a database developer, then anyone that makes use of your database - whether that be directly (developer or database administrator), or indirectly (you, as the end-user of a product that most likely makes use of a database) - is going to feel a whole lot better when you tell them that you test the database. Testing is a fundamental and well accepted part of building functional software.

CockroachDB is an excellent system of record, but no technology exists in a vacuum. Some of our users would like to keep their data mirrored in full-text indexes to power natural language search. Others want to use analytics engines and big data pipelines to run huge queries without impacting production traffic. Still others want to send mobile push notifications in response to data changes without doing the bookkeeping themselves.

My current employer uses sharded and replicated Postgres via RDS. Even basic things like deploying schema changes to every shard are an unbelievable pain in the ass, and changing the number of shards on a major database is a high-touch, multi-day operation. After having worked with Spanner in the past, it’s like going back to the stone age, like we’re only a step above babysitting individual machines in a closet. Nobody should do this. — HackerNews user GeneralMayhem

Michelle Gienow

April 12, 2023

So you need to scale. That’s a good problem to have! But should you scale up or scale out? There’s no easy answer, so let’s take a closer look at horizontal scaling vs. vertical scaling , how they compare, and what the pros and cons are for each approach.

Charlie Custer

April 10, 2023

In this post you’ll learn about the CockroachDB Cloud API and how I’ve used it to create an application Dashboard with Next.js. Using the API you can build a custom interface to meet your organization’s needs, or perform various tasks relating to your database infrastructure. I’ll also explain how I’ve used NextAuth.js to create conditional authorization rules to facilitate greater control over the functionality. You can get a feel for what I’ve built using the links below. 🚀 Preview: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/demos/demo-cloud-api/ ⚙️ GitHub: https://github.com/cockroachdb/demo-cloud-api/

Paul Scanlon

April 5, 2023

In the world of finance, changing databases is usually pretty rare. When you’re in charge of other people’s money — several trillion dollars of it, in the case of one of the banks discussed in this article — even small changes could represent major risks. That’s why even today, many banks still run systems based on legacy relational databases such as Oracle, IBM, and PostgreSQL — often the same databases they were using 10 or even 20 years ago.

Charlie Custer

March 21, 2023