Engineering

Syndication from What Does Write Skew Look Like by Justin Jaffray This post is about gaining intuition for Write Skew, and, by extension, Snapshot Isolation. Snapshot Isolation is billed as a transaction isolation level that offers a good mix between performance and correctness, but the precise meaning of “correctness” here is often vague. In this post I want to break down and capture exactly when the thing called “write skew” can happen.

What does a Test Engineer do? The Test Engineering team (TestEng) is a new and exciting team embedded within Engineering. We are accomplished engineers on a quest for higher quality. Collectively, we have built complex and impressive software systems at startups and big tech, written test frameworks and program analysis tools; and even applied formal verification and automated reasoning. We have done all of those things and more while obsessing about correctness and performance, yet never quite achieving nirvana.

Imagine you’re watching a baseball game. In the middle of the fifth inning, your pitcher throws a strike, and then another one. The fan sitting next to you jumps to his feet in jubilant celebration. You could be forgiven for wondering what’s going on. After all, it takes three strikes to get a batter out – why is this guy dancing like the game is already over?

Charlie Custer

December 14, 2021

Like all software systems, metrics are crucial for understanding the inner workings of a system and getting a pulse on how that system is functioning. Any monitoring and debugging framework is incomplete without metrics.

As a developer, you may not have spent a lot of time thinking about database connections. A single database connection is not expensive, but as things scale up, problems can emerge. So let’s (ahem) dive into the world of connection pooling, and take a look at how it can help us build more performant applications, especially when we’re operating at scale.

Charlie Custer

November 30, 2021

If you remember from the Marvel Avengers movies, one of the most critical and universe-defining events is “the blip” or “the snap.” This article will show you how to build a simple web app using Node.js that shows all the Marvel characters and their “blip” status, giving us the ability to update each character’s blip state on the database by clicking a button. We use Express.js as our framework and Pug for page templates and seed the database with character data from the official Marvel API while referencing our list of blipped and non-blipped characters to add a flag to the data. And, of course, CockroachDB Serverless is our database. Finally, we deploy our app to Heroku.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that allows you to automate running and orchestrating container workloads. It is a powerful tool that offers a huge ecosystem of tools — package managers, service meshes, source plugins, monitoring tools, and more — as an abstraction layer for deploying standardized, full-stack applications across an ever-increasing range of platforms. Kubernetes is often referred to as “K8s.”

Michelle Gienow

July 14, 2021

A few days ago, we (Artem and Chris) were working with two different customers that had the same requirement: they needed to encrypt certain tables in their databases. This is not uncommon. Encryption comes with a slight performance penalty, so many companies prefer not to encrypt their entire database. Instead, the best practice is to encrypt only the tables that contain sensitive information, so less-sensitive data can be accessed without the overhead the encryption creates.

As we outlined in Deploy a Multi-Region Application in Just 3 Steps, we’ve made major changes to simplify the multi-region configuration in CockroachDB. The new abstractions allow users to think of multi-region databases and tables in three ways: