Product

There are two different ways to use CockroachDB as a managed service and enjoy DBaaS benefits: CockroachDB Dedicated is a fully managed single-tenant service used by companies to store their data while adhering to their enterprise compliance requirements. CockroachDB Serverless offers automatically scalable service for building new and nimble applications while paying for only what you use.

Tomorrow, as you undoubtedly know, is day-one of an annual two-day retail event known as “Amazon Prime Day”. Two days of frenetic consumerism that stress Amazon’s architecture in much the same way that Black Friday and Cyber Monday stress the whole retail industry. In 2018 Amazon’s site served a 404 error for hours on Prime Day. But there’s no need to pick on Amazon…J. Crew, Macy’s, H&M, Lowes and others have all endured costly downtime during peak traffic. Three years of masks and stay-at-home mandates forced users to online shopping and forced retailers to scale their online operations to serve unprecedented customer volume. Some even had to establish their first-ever digital presence in order to survive widespread lockdowns that shuttered physical retailers. Survivability established, next came the need to meet equally unrelenting customer demands for fast and personalized user experiences across a vast spectrum of digital devices and platforms. Now elastic scalability, sophisticated personalization, and a seamless omnichannel experience are simply table stakes for modern retail organizations. That’s why choosing the right database infrastructure has become a business imperative. Not just to support surging high-transaction workloads, but also to ensure survival in the face of several dire trends facing retailers today.

Michelle Gienow

July 11, 2022

In simple terms, a relational (SQL) database stores structured data that conforms to a predefined schema. A document-model (or NoSQL) database stores documents that may contain unstructured data without a schema. At least, that’s the way that these two database storage models have traditionally been discussed.

Jim Walker

July 7, 2022

One of the most interesting questions we get to dig into in our annual Cloud Report is which CPUs offer the best performance – and more importantly, the best price for performance – for large OLTP workloads. To answer that question (among others) we test dozens of instance types across the three major public clouds – AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Charlie Custer

June 29, 2022

What is metadata, exactly? Metadata is data about other data. That’s a very broad definition, though. When you start trying to get specific, it can get murky pretty quickly. In our experience with our customers, we see “metadata” commonly used to describe two different sorts of use cases

Charlie Custer

June 24, 2022

We depend on financial companies and services to help us navigate just about everything — to the point where they’re basically a form of critical infrastructure, at least existentially speaking. (Try to imagine getting through the rest of your day right now if your credit card froze or your financial services were suddenly unavailable. Do you have enough cash on you to buy lunch, or a ticket/tank of gas to drive home?). In such a complex and far-reaching sector, there are many ways things can go wrong. And, unfortunately, as your platform/application/services grow, the number of possible stress points scales right along with them.

Michelle Gienow

June 23, 2022

Over the past year, Cockroach Labs has been working hard to give our observability tooling some extra love. When it comes to monitoring our cloud products, such as CockroachDB Dedicated, meeting our customers where they are is one of our primary goals. Many organizations already have a platform in place to monitor their systems, and we’d like them to feel right at home when it comes to monitoring their CockroachDB cluster. But with so many platforms available in the ever-changing observability market today, like Datadog, Amazon CloudWatch, and more, how do we stay flexible in our observability tooling? The popular tools of today are not guaranteed to stand the test of time. Therefore, we need a platform for third party monitoring integrations that’s flexible enough to support both the platforms of today, as well as those of tomorrow. For Cockroach Labs, we chose the OpenTelemetry Collector to serve as such a platform and to integrate with Datadog as the first of what we hope to someday be a substantial library of third party integrations. This blog post discusses the capabilities of the OpenTelemetry Collector and how we introduced it into our cloud infrastructure.

For operators, architects and developers alike, data domiciling can be one tough technical nemesis. Privacy regulations like GDPR create strict requirements where data can live in the world. To meet these requirements companies traditionally had to run separate databases in different geographic regions. This results in a huge operational overhead and reliability also takes a hit, since it can be hard to guarantee region survival while complying with data domiciling restrictions.

Michelle Gienow

June 13, 2022

The 2022 Cloud Report is finally here, and we think it was worth the wait! In this completely free 70+ report, you’ll find the results of over 3,000 OLTP test runs analyzing 56 different instance types across AWS, GCP, and Azure for performance and price, as well as hundreds of additional runs benchmarking CPU performance, network latency and throughput, and storage. Want a little taste of what’s inside? For the first time ever, we saw machines with AMD chips eclipse Intel: instance types with the latest-gen AMD Milan CPUs took the top spots for both performance and price-for-performance in our OLTP benchmarking.

Charlie Custer

June 13, 2022