Blog
Product
An electronics giant saved millions after migrating from MySQL to CockroachDB
Upgrading and modernizing your database can sound like an expensive proposition. But it doesn’t have to be. One major electronics company found that shifting from MySQL to CockroachDB saved them $700,000 in their first year, earning them a 149% ROI.
Charlie Custer
March 2, 2023
Product
Converting cloud provider regions into country flags
Learn how Paul created an open source JavaScript utility package to help convert cloud provider region codes into real locations and country flags.
Paul Scanlon
February 17, 2023
Product
Distributed transactions: What, why, and how to build a distributed transactional application
Transactions make up an important part of the database workload for most modern applications. And when it comes time to scale up operations for a growing business, distributing those workloads across multiple hardware systems for horizontal scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance is often an important part of the plan.
Charlie Custer
February 16, 2023
Product
Building a sports betting application to handle ‘Big Game’ traffic
The popularity of sports betting, also called real-money gaming, is exploding. And at least in the US, there’s no bigger moment for sports betting than this weekend. The NFL’s championship game – you know, the game with the name we’re not allowed to say – is likely to be watched by around 100 million people. And with the growing legality and popularity of sports betting apps in the US, it is very likely this game will see more money flowing through betting apps than ever before.
Charlie Custer
February 9, 2023
Product
What is VPC peering and when should you use it?
If you’re building and managing applications in public cloud providers like GCP or AWS, chances are you’ve heard of VPC peering. This blog post explains what VPC peering is, why you’d want to use it, and, if you’re using CockroachDB Dedicated today, how you can get started with our VPC peering functionality.
Tommy Truongchau
February 2, 2023
Product
PCI-DSS: CockroachDB Dedicated is certified to store confidential data
We are thrilled to announce that CockroachDB Dedicated, the fully managed service of CockroachDB, is now PCI-DSS certified by a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) as a PCI Level 1 Service Provider. The PCI-DSS was created by the PCI Security Standards Council - an organization formed in 2006 by the major credit card associations (Visa, American Express, MasterCard and JCB). The mission of this council is to establish a “minimum security standard” to protect customers’ payment information. Any business that handles credit card and payment data is required to conform to that minimum standard referred to as the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS).
Abhinav Garg
January 31, 2023
Product
What to do when a transaction fails in CockroachDB
If you’re working with CockroachDB, chances are that you care about transactional consistency. CockroachDB offers ACID transactional guarantees, including serializable isolation to ensure that no matter the volume of transactions or how many transactions are being processed in parallel, each transaction is committed to the database sequentially. These guarantees ensure that your database maintains ironclad consistency immediately, which is important for many transactional applications. (Every application has a range of business use cases that determine how consistent its database needs to be. For transactional workloads, an eventually consistent database is often not the right persistence tool). However, CockroachDB’s strong ACID guarantees do mean that occasionally transactions will fail and will need to be retried. Let’s take a closer look at why that happens, and how retries can be accomplished.
Charlie Custer
January 30, 2023
Product
Writing History: How we rebuilt bulk operations to preserve a history of changes
This is part 1 of a 3-part blog series about how we’ve improved the way CockroachDB stores and modifies data in bulk. We went way down into the deepest layers of our storage system, then up to our SQL schema changes and their transaction timestamps - all without anybody noticing (or at least we hope!)
David Taylor
January 18, 2023
Product
Use Cloud IAM Roles from your CockroachDB clusters
When working with an OLTP database, customers’ data protection concerns manifest in different ways. Whether it is about the ability to encrypt data with one’s own keys, redacting cluster logs, field-level data masking or something else, we have partnered closely with our customers in providing more than what they were looking for. So, when we heard feedback that customers needed a way to obfuscate cloud resource credentials when running backup-restore or changefeed SQL commands, we decided to outdo that requirement. Backup-Restore and real-time changefeeds are two of the most critical capabilities in an OLTP database. The former applies to disaster recovery whereas the latter allows integration with analytics platforms or is sometimes used for replication.