As you may already be aware, Cockroach Labs has had a presence in Toronto for several years. Today however, we’re happy to announce that we’ve signed the lease for our first dedicated Toronto office at 33 Yonge Street. We’re very excited about this milestone, as it's the culmination of a lot of hard work we’ve been doing in the city over the last few years.

Last year the BulkIO team at Cockroach Labs replaced the implementation of our IMPORT bulk-loading feature with a simpler and faster data ingestion pipeline. In most of our tests, it looked like a major improvement: the release notes for CockroachDB v19.2 touted "4x faster" IMPORT. Many a 🎉 reaction was clicked, and the team moved on to new projects. But over the following months, it became clear we had celebrated too soon: we started to get reports of some IMPORTs that, instead of being faster, were much slower or even getting stuck. Armed with a test that could reproduce such a case, we started to dig.

Throughout the year, we offer internships at Cockroach Labs to give students opportunities to gain industry experience and work on challenging problems within distributed systems. Bilal Akhtar is a Member of Technical Staff at Cockroach Labs, working on the Core Storage team and toying with KV storage engines. Outside of work, you’ll see him reading non-fiction, or giving urban photography a shot.