Imagine you’re watching a baseball game. In the middle of the fifth inning, your pitcher throws a strike, and then another one. The fan sitting next to you jumps to his feet in jubilant celebration. You could be forgiven for wondering what’s going on. After all, it takes three strikes to get a batter out – why is this guy dancing like the game is already over?

Charlie Custer

December 14, 2021

Online gambling is one of the fastest-growing industries on the planet, with the market expected to be worth more than $127 billion by 2027. But it’s also a very challenging vertical for app development.

Charlie Custer

December 8, 2021

As a developer, you may not have spent a lot of time thinking about database connections. A single database connection is not expensive, but as things scale up, problems can emerge. So let’s (ahem) dive into the world of connection pooling, and take a look at how it can help us build more performant applications, especially when we’re operating at scale.

Charlie Custer

November 30, 2021

Dealing with slow database performance? One potential cause of this problem is database contention. Even if you’re not struggling with a slow database right now, database contention is important to understand. The contention monster often doesn’t rear its ugly head until an application has reached significant scale. It’s best to be prepared, so in this article we’re going to look at both how to avoid contention issues and how to diagnose and resolve them when they do arise. But first, we have to understand what they are.

Charlie Custer

November 22, 2021

Serverless databases are the future. The rise of the serverless database means that developers can enjoy the benefits of traditional relational databases — ACID compliance, familiar SQL, etc. — together with the advantages of serverless databases — elastic scaling, consumption-based billing, bulletproof resilience, etc.

Charlie Custer

November 3, 2021

You’ve built a cool multiplayer game. Now how do you scale it? Distributed SQL databases are an increasingly popular choice for game devs because they make scaling and fault tolerance easy without sacrificing transactional consistency. But as developers make the switch to distributed databases, there are opportunities for optimization that can be easy to overlook if they haven’t adapted to the distributed mindset. Chris Molozian, the CEO and co-founder of Heroic Labs, knows a lot about optimizing distributed databases for game development. Heroic Labs has made gaming infrastructure its business, and its Nakama gaming servers are powering games from studios such as mobile gaming powerhouse Zynga and PC strategy gaming titan Paradox. Nakama servers use CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database, for “all core data.” And that’s a lot of data: currently, the largest game using Heroic Labs infrastructure has about 300 million players. At that kind of scale, even the tiniest optimizations can make a huge difference. In a recent conversation with Cockroach Labs Principal Product Evangelist Jim Walker, Molozian highlighted two examples of the subtleties of distributed database optimization for game developers.

Charlie Custer

November 1, 2021

So you’re building a TypeScript application. You’ll need a database to power it, and an ORM to link your application to that database. We’d like to suggest a powerful combination that’s surprisingly easy to set up: TypeORM (a popular TypeScript ORM) and CockroachDB. This combination is so powerful, in fact, that we’ve created a narrative-driven tutorial about a powerful wizard that will help you get set up with CockroachDB and link your new distributed SQL database to your application.

Charlie Custer

September 14, 2021

When Friday the 13th, a video game adaptation of the slasher film franchise, first launched, gamers booted it up hoping for the same kind of horror experience they’d seen on the silver screen. But instead of Jason Voorhees’s creepy mask, many of them were greeted by a different sort of scare: Game Database Login Failure.

Charlie Custer

September 7, 2021

You certainly don’t need a GUI to work with a Postgres-compliant database. For example, CockroachDB – a Postgres-compliant distributed SQL database – comes with a powerful SQL shell that you can run right from your console. But what if you want something a little more visual? Never fear! There are quite a few options for third-party graphic user interface (GUI) tools for CockroachDB. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular ones.

Charlie Custer

September 1, 2021