Engineering

*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

*Note: This blog was originally published in 2017. Everything is still true today. It is being updated to include additional capabilities in CockroachDB. Namely, bounded staleness reads. The CAP theorem is a fundamental part of the theory of distributed systems. It states that in the presence of partitions (i.e. network failures), a system cannot be both consistent and available, and must choose one of the two.

Ben Darnell

May 5, 2022

3 basic rules for choosing indexes There are a few basic rules to keep in mind when choosing indexes for a database. A good index should have these three properties: Usefulness: Speed up the execution of some queries (or enforce a constraint) Clustering: Keep records that are likely to be accessed together near each other Scattering: Keep records that are unlikely to be accessed together far apart

Ben Darnell

May 3, 2022

A recent tweet inspired me to address the need for fuzzy matching by combining some existing capabilities of CockroachDB. Note the key features mentioned in the tweet: - similar but not equal sporting events names: a common pattern. Users tend to mis-type data in input fields, and data isn’t always correct. Nevertheless, we’d like to return the closest match. - I’d rather use this in-built feature than pay for a whole ES cluster with added maintenance overhead to boot: This is the second time I’ve heard this sentiment in the past couple of months. ES is a full-featured search engine and delivers a great experience but, for this purpose, would be overkill and would require additional time and expense to deploy and operate.

Michael Goddard

April 18, 2022