Blog
Product
How to build modern gaming services — with reference architecture
Let game developers develop games. It doesn’t exactly sound revolutionary. But back in the day, that’s not always how things worked. Every game had its own systems for things like stat tracking, item purchases, user entitlements (in-game items a user has purchased or unlocked), and game devs often got bogged down building bespoke functionality into each of their games to handle these user features.
Charlie Custer
November 3, 2022
Product
Have some CAKE: The new (stateful) serverless stack
Serverless application stacks have been stuck in a dilemma: Most applications need some kind of state store, but most state stores aren’t serverless. Rich-data applications like payment apps, buy online/pick up in store services, and real-time online sports betting are incompatible with fully serverless architecture simply because, at some point, the database becomes a bottleneck. Why?
Keith McClellan
October 27, 2022
Product
How to get your data into CockroachDB Serverless
So you’ve spun up a free CockroachDB cluster, and now you’ve got a next-generation distributed SQL database. That’s great! Now, how do you actually get your data into it? Thankfully, there are lots of ways to get your data into CockroachDB. So many, in fact, that we can’t actually cover all of them. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the most common ways to get your data into CockroachDB, whether you’re working with a database dump from something like MySQL or PostgreSQL, or you’ve just got a CSV you exported from Excel.
Charlie Custer
October 24, 2022
Product
How we built a serverless SQL database
We recently announced general availability (GA) for Serverless, with support for change data capture (CDC), backup and restore, and a 99.99% uptime SLA. Read on to learn how CockroachDB Serverless works from the inside out, and why we can give it away for free – not free for some limited period, but free. It required some significant and fascinating engineering to get us there. I think you’ll enjoy reading about it in this blog or watching the recent presentation I gave with my colleague Emily Horing:
Andy Kimball
October 11, 2022
Product
Which GCP instances are best for OLTP workloads?
Choosing the right instance type for your workload can be a tricky proposition. It’s not always clear how a particular configuration is going to perform for your workload, and running the tests to find out is time consuming and expensive.
Charlie Custer
October 10, 2022
Product
No time to live: James Bond explains row-level time to live
“Do you know what time it is? Time to die.” -Nomi That’s it. That’s row-level TTL in a James Bond nutshell. Which is appropriate given that today is James Bond Day. You probably don’t need to read further than that one quote from Nomi (possibly the next 007?). Because you get it now. But row-level TTL has been one of our most requested features dating back to 2017. It’s rare for issues on our github to get this many votes. So I hope you’ll forgive me for indulging in this metaphor a bit longer.
Dan Kelly
October 5, 2022
Product
Serverless for survival
When new technologies arise we first adopt them for their technical value. If that value proves out, then we reach the magic “crossing the chasm” moment: when a technology jumps to widespread adoption through proven business value and goes mainstream. Some technologies, a very select few, make one more jump forward, however — from mainstream to existential imperative.
Michelle Gienow
September 22, 2022
Engineering
Product
Company
CockroachDB Serverless is generally available and more product updates
When we set out to build a better relational database seven years ago, we envisioned a solution that was scalable, highly available, and always consistent, because as we said then, “we’d rather spend time quickly building and iterating products, not engineering solutions to database shortcomings.” Today, after developing a database that delivers those capabilities and has been battle-tested by thousands of customers, we’re still following the same northstar. But we’ve extended that vision.
Nate Stewart
September 21, 2022
Product
Monitor your CockroachDB clusters with cloud-native log services
Identifying transaction bottlenecks or getting an audit trail of user actions in the database can be challenging without self-service observability. Often, the only way to access cluster logs is to request them from technical support, which is painfully inefficient. If a particular set of SQL queries from an application is taking more time to execute than anticipated, not having timely access to logs to help troubleshoot slow query performance could mean end users suffering an inferior experience for longer than desired and the application team not being able to adhere to their SLA / SLO. And if the InfoSec team needs real-time information to identify which users are accessing confidential data fields in tables with sensitive data, going through the support team can hamper appropriate auditability. CockroachDB now makes it possible to export your CockroachDB Dedicated logs to your AWS Cloudwatch or GCP Cloud Logging instances. You can collect and visualize cluster logs directly in those cloud-native services, and from there optionally send them to other third-party Observability platforms for centralized monitoring. You can do all this on your own. No technical support required.
Abhinav Garg
September 15, 2022