Product

Large enterprises with hundreds of developers building thousands of applications and services have a suite of database options to choose from. They also typically have a full team dedicated to maintaining these offerings. The saying “use the best tool for the job” is why they offer so many options, since different workloads have different requirements. Over the past few years, the “best tools” have changed because of the increasing demand on infrastructure generated by business-critical, high-volume, workloads.

Cassie McAllister

May 18, 2023

In this post Rob and I explain how we built Silo, a fully functioning multi-region Next.js application combining CockroachDB multi-region serverless and a multi-region Node.js (Lambda) API backed by a Geographically aware Route 53 Hosted Zone. Both the API and CockroachDB have been deployed to AWS. The Next.js app has been deployed using Vercel. There are a number of reasons why you’d want to choose a multi-region strategy; to optimize latency, maintain high availability and, in some cases, to comply with regional regulations. But, rather than tell you about the benefits, I’d like to show you.

Rob Reid

May 17, 2023

Today we released a series of exciting updates to give you even more flexibility to run CockroachDB how you want, where you want, more efficiently than ever before. Customers often tell us they want the benefits of the cloud (elastic scale, consumption-based costs, operational ease of managed services, etc.), without the drawbacks of being locked-in to a single provider’s platform or proprietary services. We built CockroachDB from the beginning to maximize flexibility and control while still delivering the automation and efficiency we have all come to expect from cloud-native tools. The new capabilities we’ve made available today strengthen those values.

Meagan Goldman

May 16, 2023

Upserts are useful for anyone who works with a database to know, but the term “upsert” might not even appear in your DBMS’s documentation! So what is an upsert, anyway? And why might it not be mentioned in your docs?

Charlie Custer

May 8, 2023

When building a multi-region application, one of the first things to consider is how and where data will be placed. For example, when building a gambling application deployed across the country, you want to make sure users have quick access to their data no matter their location. Gamblers and the platforms they use both need low latency access to real-time data. It can make or break the user experience. This is an easy example because money is won and lost, but the requirement for applications to deliver low latency experiences to a global user base is obviously applicable to every other industry as well.

Would you fly in an aircraft that wasn’t tested? Get behind the wheel of a car whose model hadn’t been crash-tested? What about using a distributed database for storing your mission critical data that hadn’t been tested and gone through quality assurance? I’d happily wager that if you are a database developer, then anyone that makes use of your database - whether that be directly (developer or database administrator), or indirectly (you, as the end-user of a product that most likely makes use of a database) - is going to feel a whole lot better when you tell them that you test the database. Testing is a fundamental and well accepted part of building functional software.

CockroachDB is an excellent system of record, but no technology exists in a vacuum. Some of our users would like to keep their data mirrored in full-text indexes to power natural language search. Others want to use analytics engines and big data pipelines to run huge queries without impacting production traffic. Still others want to send mobile push notifications in response to data changes without doing the bookkeeping themselves.

My current employer uses sharded and replicated Postgres via RDS. Even basic things like deploying schema changes to every shard are an unbelievable pain in the ass, and changing the number of shards on a major database is a high-touch, multi-day operation. After having worked with Spanner in the past, it’s like going back to the stone age, like we’re only a step above babysitting individual machines in a closet. Nobody should do this. — HackerNews user GeneralMayhem

Michelle Gienow

April 12, 2023

So you need to scale. That’s a good problem to have! But should you scale up or scale out? There’s no easy answer, so let’s take a closer look at horizontal scaling vs. vertical scaling , how they compare, and what the pros and cons are for each approach.

Charlie Custer

April 10, 2023