Engineering

In 2019, we published an exploration of the size and makeup of the executable files produced by the Go compiler. CockroachDB engineers, the Go team, and the greater Go community were intrigued by the analysis, and the results of it pushed our projects further. Two years passed, and both Go and CockroachDB had evolved significantly in that time. We wanted to explore: What might have changed? What could we learn?

Do you enjoy weird and strange build issues? Or do you think something we do in this blog post is fishy and you want to fix it? Want us to use bazel instead? Good news - we’ve got a role for you! We’re on the lookout for more engineers on our Developer Infrastructure team! We’re looking to expand our sprawling development infrastructure as we grow to more people and a bigger codebase with new and exciting functionality and cloud management. If you want to help the engineers write the exciting next generation of databases by empowering their work environment, don’t delay - apply today!

The current mentorship model is broken. It requires you to have the privilege of belonging to an established network (like a renowned university) or ‘cold call’ potential mentors on a platform like LinkedIn. Even after you find a mentor, it’s difficult to sustain a mentor-mentee connection. This is the challenge a group of students from Lassonde School of Engineering at York University set out to resolve through their Hack the North 2020++ app: mntr.tech

Amruta Ranade

March 19, 2021

It’s been over six years since CockroachDB became a GitHub project. In that time, the project has racked up more than 20,000 GitHub stars, which is a simple way for GitHub users to bookmark repositories that interest them. Naturally, we’ve wondered how people find out about our project. Are there things we could do to accelerate awareness and interest?

Spencer Kimball

February 22, 2021

As long as you’re willing to follow the rules, deploying on Kubernetes and air travel can be quite pleasant. More often than not, things will “just work”. However, if one is interested in traveling with an alligator that must remain alive or scaling a database that must remain available, the situation is likely to become a bit more complicated. It may even be easier to build one’s own plane or database for that matter. Traveling with reptiles aside, scaling a highly available stateful system is no trivial task.

While not exactly envious of our current crop of interns (because, you know, the whole work from home thing), I’ll admit I find myself reminiscing back to when I was one myself. I’m still surprised the engineering team let me anywhere near the stuff they did. When I first interned four years ago, we had declared a just code yellow to focus our energy towards stabilizing CRDB. Having joined the newly-formed distributed query execution1 team, but now with its focus directed elsewhere, what this meant for me was free rein to flesh out distributed hash and merge joins2, few aggregation primitives (think SUM, COUNT, DISTINCT, etc.), and some sorting algorithms.

CockroachDB users trust us with their most sensitive data (see: healthcare, finance). And the best way for us to maintain that trust is for Cockroach Labs to never see this data at all. In CockroachDB v20.2, our tooling is able to automatically redact users' sensitive data out of log files, so that Cockroach Labs never even receives it. We also do this always for crash report telemetry.

The 2021 Cloud Report stands on benchmarks. Now in its third year, our report is more precise than ever, capturing an evaluation of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that tells realistic and universal performance stories on behalf of mission-critical OLTP applications.

Support for spatial data and spatial indexing is one of the most requested features in the history of CockroachDB. The first issue requesting spatial data in CockroachDB was opened in October 2017, and closed on November 12, 2020 with the release of spatial data storage in CockroachDB 20.2.