Product

While many companies have long since moved their application data and analytics data into the cloud, operational data has lagged a bit behind. There are a variety of reasons for this, but a primary one is that operational data is often both sensitive (containing PII) and mission-critical. Many companies are hesitant to fix something that, from their perspective, has not been broken, and hesitant to put critical data into the hands of people outside the company. This mindset is changing fast, though. While the old model may not be fully broken for everyone, it is breaking. For one thing, in 2022 the old way has simply become too expensive. And managed cloud database options are maturing, addressing some of the performance and security concerns that early adopters once had about them.

Charlie Custer

September 13, 2022

I’m often asked by developers how they can squeeze the most performance out of their database. While there are other SQL performance best practices to consider, by far the easiest (and biggest) performance improvement comes from good use of indexes. I’ll break this down into two categories: (1), knowing what’s possible, and (2) knowing what you’re actually getting.

There are occasions in which businesses need their database to fit into unusual production environments for specific use cases. In this blog, we’ll push the boundaries and test whether CockroachDB can work and thrive in new and unusual places, such as: • On an IBM Mainframe • On an ARM64 CPU

Jeffrey White

August 30, 2022

Running a geographically distributed database has a lot of benefits. We see enterprise companies, startups, and students choose distributed databases for reliability, scalability, and even security. But many distributed databases come at a serious cost: latency. Distributing nodes across the globe means your data will need to travel from one node to the other. By its very definition, distribution creates latency. Geo-partitioning your data in CockroachDB makes it easy to minimize that latency. We believe you shouldn’t have to sacrifice the benefits of a distributed database to achieve impressive throughput and low latency. With geo-partitioning, we can minimize latency by minimizing the distance between where SQL queries are issued and where the data to satisfy those queries resides.

The details in this post are based on The Netflix Tech Blog post titled “Towards a Reliable Device Management Platform”. The Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry is extremely profitable – it has raked in billions of dollars each year for the last several years. The U.S. M&E industry is the largest in the world, valued at $660 billion (of the $2 trillion global market) despite seeing a 7.3% year-on-year decline in 2020 due to the pandemic. While the pandemic accelerated existing trends (i.e. the streaming subscription model), it halted others (i.e. box office sales). Many M&E companies had to pivot their business model to stay competitive. For example, we saw several studios release first-run movies directly to streaming services, which allowed them to expand to an even larger audience. The M&E industry is on the rebound from 2020, and major players are figuring out new ways to build relationships with customers that last years, not weeks. One thing that’s been clear is the importance of creating an agile business model that allows you to iterate on new ideas and quickly adapt to market changes driven by customer demands.

Cassie McAllister

August 18, 2022

Trying to choose between the three main public cloud providers – AWS, GCP, and Azure – isn’t easy. There are a lot of factors to consider, and no single cloud provider is going to be the best option for every use case. When it comes to running OLTP workloads, though, we wanted to see if any of the clouds stood out in terms of price for performance. In our 2022 Cloud Report, we ran extensive testing on 56 different instance types across the three clouds to answer that question for our customers.

Charlie Custer

August 12, 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

Full text indexing and search is such a common feature of applications these days. Users expect to be able to find a restaurant, a product, a movie review, or any number of other things quickly by entering a few search terms into a user interface. Many of these apps are built using a relational database as the data store, so the apps aren’t generally dedicated to search, but incorporate that as an added feature.

Michael Goddard

July 27, 2022

Back in April 2021, Cockroach Labs completed our first SOC 2 Type II audit. Now, thanks to collaboration between multiple teams led by the Compliance team, we have completed our second. As CockroachDB continues to evolve and add new products and features, we need to ensure that those new products and features meet various sets of security and compliance standards. This latest SOC 2 Type II audit covers a full 12 month review period for both of CockroachDB’s managed services offerings, CockroachDB Dedicated and CockroachDB Serverless. But before we get more in-depth on this new addition, let’s quickly recap what a SOC 2 Type II audit covers and why it’s important.