Product

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

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

Each October, RoachFest gathers together application owners, architects, engineers, and operators running their data-intensive workloads on CockroachDB (along with other innovators who are exploring doing the same). This conference centers on our users: attendees share their work, meet their peers, and learn first-hand from the builders behind the database. They’re also the first to hear about our latest product and feature releases, and the new capabilities they unlock for users.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how to safely add and drop columns from a SQL database using ALTER TABLE … ADD and ALTER TABLE … DROP COLUMN. We will also briefly touch on adding and dropping constraints on SQL tables, since that functions in the same way and since it’s important to consider constraints anyway when you’re adding columns to a table.

Charlie Custer

October 2, 2023

Most SQL content on the web seems to be written with data analysts in mind. And that’s fine, but developers need SQL too! Your application is only as available and performant as your database, and solid database performance doesn’t just mean knowing how to INNER JOIN or SELECT *, it also means understanding monitoring and ops commands, using EXPLAIN ANALYZE, etc.

Charlie Custer

September 21, 2023