Product

Serverless databases are the future. The rise of the serverless database means that developers can enjoy the benefits of traditional relational databases — ACID compliance, familiar SQL, etc. — together with the advantages of serverless databases — elastic scaling, consumption-based billing, bulletproof resilience, etc.

Charlie Custer

November 3, 2021

You’ve built a cool multiplayer game. Now how do you scale it? Distributed SQL databases are an increasingly popular choice for game devs because they make scaling and fault tolerance easy without sacrificing transactional consistency. But as developers make the switch to distributed databases, there are opportunities for optimization that can be easy to overlook if they haven’t adapted to the distributed mindset. Chris Molozian, the CEO and co-founder of Heroic Labs, knows a lot about optimizing distributed databases for game development. Heroic Labs has made gaming infrastructure its business, and its Nakama gaming servers are powering games from studios such as mobile gaming powerhouse Zynga and PC strategy gaming titan Paradox. Nakama servers use CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database, for “all core data.” And that’s a lot of data: currently, the largest game using Heroic Labs infrastructure has about 300 million players. At that kind of scale, even the tiniest optimizations can make a huge difference. In a recent conversation with Cockroach Labs Principal Product Evangelist Jim Walker, Molozian highlighted two examples of the subtleties of distributed database optimization for game developers.

Charlie Custer

November 1, 2021

All databases are ultimately just applications. Fundamentally, then, the definition of a serverless database is any database that embodies the core principles of a serverless application: No server management Automatic elastic scale Built-in resiliency and fault tolerance Consumption-based billing Instant access and always available

Michelle Gienow

October 28, 2021

This article starts entirely from scratch to build a simple app with Node.js, Express.js, and CockroachDB Serverless to collect and display contact information. To follow this tutorial, you just need to know some JavaScript. You can v*iew complete code here on GitHub.*

Only two years after embarking on formal partnerships with the leading cloud providers, Cockroach Labs is excited to announce an expanded strategic alliance with Google Cloud. This partnership is a testament to the array of business and digital transformation benefits companies are witnessing by deploying CockroachDB on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). One such company is Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics, which has been using CockroachDB on Google Cloud since 2017. As an international company that processes hundreds of thousands of transactions in over 900 stores located across 47 different countries, guaranteeing data consistency on a secure infrastructure is of utmost importance to Lush.

Aika Zikibayeva

October 12, 2021

So you’re building a TypeScript application. You’ll need a database to power it, and an ORM to link your application to that database. We’d like to suggest a powerful combination that’s surprisingly easy to set up: TypeORM (a popular TypeScript ORM) and CockroachDB. This combination is so powerful, in fact, that we’ve created a narrative-driven tutorial about a powerful wizard that will help you get set up with CockroachDB and link your new distributed SQL database to your application.

Charlie Custer

September 14, 2021

When Friday the 13th, a video game adaptation of the slasher film franchise, first launched, gamers booted it up hoping for the same kind of horror experience they’d seen on the silver screen. But instead of Jason Voorhees’s creepy mask, many of them were greeted by a different sort of scare: Game Database Login Failure.

Charlie Custer

September 7, 2021

You certainly don’t need a GUI to work with a Postgres-compliant database. For example, CockroachDB – a Postgres-compliant distributed SQL database – comes with a powerful SQL shell that you can run right from your console. But what if you want something a little more visual? Never fear! There are quite a few options for third-party graphic user interface (GUI) tools for CockroachDB. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular ones.

Charlie Custer

September 1, 2021

Follower reads are a key feature that developers wanting to use multi-region databases should understand. We originally introduced them in this blog post, and later documented their use here. In this post, we’ll quickly review the basics of follower reads, highlight some potential issues, and propose a new type of follower reads that we’re exploring to address those issues: bounded staleness reads.