Engineering

In this post we’re going to talk about one of the techniques that can be used in CockroachDB for getting good performance from databases accessed from multiple geographical regions: follower reads. These are operations presenting a slightly stale view of data, which can be served with local latencies from different regions.

I once went to a website that had “hours of operation,” and was only “open” when its brick and mortar counterpart had its lights on. I felt perplexed and a little frustrated; computers are capable of running all day every day, so why shouldn’t they? I’d been habituated to the internet’s incredible availability guarantees. However, before the internet, 24/7 high availability wasn’t “a thing.” Availability was desirable, but not something to which we felt fundamentally entitled. We used computers only when we needed them; they weren’t waiting idly by on the off-chance a request came by. As the internet grew, those previously uncommon requests at 3am local time became prime business hours partway across the globe, and making sure that a computer could facilitate the request was important.

Jessica Edwards

March 23, 2023

JSON is a ubiquitous data interchange format supported by many systems, including CockroachDB. Historically, at CockroachDB, the majority of our efforts around JSON focused on supporting various JSON functions, operators, and inverted indexes while our JSON parser did not receive much attention. And for a good reason. If you are reading this blog, then you probably already appreciate Golang. There are many aspects to like in Go, and one of them is an excellent collection of standard (and third party) libraries. Becase Go ships with a “jack-of-all-trades” JSON parser out of the box (encoding/json library), it made sense for CockroachDB to use a standard parser when converting strings to internal JSON representation. However, at some point, we began to wonder if the time had arrived for us to invest in finding a better, more performant alternative.

*Note: this post originally ran in 2020, at the very beginning of our managed service/multi-tenant engineering journey. If you want an update on what kind of deployment models CockroachDB offers and what our current capabilities are check out our latest release blog. There’s this really fun game I like to play. You get a bunch of SREs in a room and you see how quickly you can rile them up. Here are some things to say next time you’re in a room of SREs:

Josh Imhoff

October 20, 2022

When we set out to build a better relational database seven years ago, we envisioned a solution that was scalable, highly available, and always consistent, because as we said then, “we’d rather spend time quickly building and iterating products, not engineering solutions to database shortcomings.” Today, after developing a database that delivers those capabilities and has been battle-tested by thousands of customers, we’re still following the same northstar. But we’ve extended that vision.

Nate Stewart

September 21, 2022

The latest research paper from CockroachDB’s engineering team, “A Demonstration of Multi-Region CockroachDB”, will appear in the Demonstration Track of the VLDB 2022 conference in Sydney, Australia (as well as remotely), on September 5-9. This paper complements our recent full paper, Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB, which appeared earlier this year in SIGMOD 2022.

Indexes are a crucial part of your database schema. They improve workload performance by helping the database locate data without having to scan every row of a table. Although it might be tempting to create an index for every column that your workload uses to filter data, it’s important to consider the performance tradeoffs of indexes. While indexes greatly improve the performance of read queries that use filters, they do come with a cost to write performance: data has to be written for all indexes present on the table.

Marylia Gutierrez

August 23, 2022

Observability is how you understand the current state of your database: how it is behaving, plus any potentially problematic things you should be paying attention to — and identifying improvements based on this information.

Marylia Gutierrez

August 1, 2022

Cockroaches first evolved more than 300M years ago, and yet the O.G. is still recognizable. "Modern" cockroaches are about 200M years old; that they're still with us, largely unchanged, is quite impressive from an evolutionary perspective.

Spencer Kimball

May 20, 2022