Product

Star Trek: The Next Generation may have stopped airing in 1994, but it’s a series that’s always rewarding to return to. Arguably the most cerebral of the various Star Trek film and television series, the best episodes of TNG are just as thought-provoking today as they were when they were first televised.

Charlie Custer

December 21, 2023

Just the thought of updating the database schema is enough to give some developers and architects a headache. Designing a good schema is hard enough. Updating it once it’s in production? That has to be a nightmare. Right? Well, historically it certainly has been! But it doesn’t have to be. Let’s take a look at the options for dealing with database schema, and learn how live schema changes solve challenges with both traditional relational databases and NoSQL document-store alternatives.

Rob Reid

December 8, 2023

In 2008, after Netflix pivoted from DVD-by-mail to streaming, they were running the streaming service on premise and suffered a 3-day outage. That was the beginning of their move to the cloud. First they moved to AWS. Then, in 2014, they adopted (and popularized!) Cassandra to support their need for global replication. In this two-part presentation, Netflix Senior Software Engineers Shengwei Wang and Shahar Zimmerman explain why Netflix has adopted CockroachDB and how they’re deploying it.

Dan Kelly

November 27, 2023

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are like the Superbowl for retailers. Instead of point spreads, though, e-commerce companies are betting on peak sales numbers. But while the deluge of deals evokes dreams of dollars for CEOs, the surging site traffic can be more of a nightmare for CTOs. The onslaught of shoppers puts huge amounts of stress on their application architecture. In this scenario, even a minor problem with inventory management can cause major consequences.

Charlie Custer

November 17, 2023

Before we define what a serverless database is, perhaps we should talk about what serverless means more broadly, and why there seems to be building momentum behind this general paradigm.

Jim Walker

November 2, 2023

More than 500 attendees from around the globe recently swarmed into New York for RoachFest23, the annual user conference for CockroachDB customers. The two day event featured thirty speakers from some of the world’s leading enterprise companies including engineering leads and directors at Santander, DoorDash, City Storage Systems (also known as Cloud Kitchens), Booking.com, Fortinet, and many more. The Cockroach Labs co-founders also led sessions, shared the future of CockroachDB, and released new features and capabilities now available in CockroachDB.

Michelle Gienow

October 19, 2023

High CPU usage can bring your database – and with it, your application – grinding to a halt. This is, unfortunately, a fairly common problem. But it also can be a relatively easy fix. Let’s take a look at how to check CPU usage in Postgres, and how to troubleshoot for some of the most common causes of high CPU usage.

Charlie Custer

October 16, 2023

The cloud is, by definition, a distributed system. Distributed application architecture is mainstream in the world of software — you wouldn’t build any other way. For more than a decade, though, the database has lagged behind. The architecture of traditional relational databases frequently conflicts with the architectural needs of modern cloud applications: horizontal scale, elasticity, and microservices.

Charlie Custer

October 9, 2023

When people talk about multi-region architecture, it’s often in the context of operational resilience. And that’s certainly a valid use case in a world where cloud region failures aren’t uncommon. But resilience is not the only reason to consider multi-region architecture. Fast-growing companies should also consider the virtues of multi-cloud deployments for market expansion.

Charlie Custer

October 5, 2023