Charlie Custer
Senior Technical Content MarketerCharlie is a former teacher, tech journalist, and filmmaker who’s now combined those three professions into writing and making videos about databases and application development (and occasionally messing with NLP and Python to create weird things in his spare time).
Multi-cloud demystified: pros, cons, and considerations according to the experts
Multi-cloud is not easy. Dig into our free report on the current state of multi-cloud, which contains expert advice from on-the-ground experts on pitfalls to avoid, best practices, and more.
Charlie Custer
November 14, 2023
City Storage Systems: CockroachDB on Kubernetes at global scale
Here's how City Storage Systems built a highly available, highly performant persistence layer that works for mission-critical workloads at global scale WITHOUT needing a massive team.
Charlie Custer
November 7, 2023
How to dynamically map Azure managed identities to CockroachDB SQL users
Here's how companies using Azure can allow access to CockroachDB for all approved users by dynamically mapping users in Azure Active Directory to a matching SQL user created in CockroachDB.
Charlie Custer
November 3, 2023
The Halloween Problem: a spooky (and true) SQL story
The Halloween Problem is a rare but scary issue that can haunt relational databases, mutating your data in unexpected ways if you're not careful.
Charlie Custer
October 31, 2023
SQL performance best practices: performance tuning to speed up your database
Learn how to optimize your relational database for better performance, including tuning queries, adding indexes, adjusting your schema, and more!
Charlie Custer
October 23, 2023
Product
High CPU usage in Postgres: how to detect it, and how to fix it
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
Product
What is a distributed database and how do they work?
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
Product
Multi-region architecture for new market expansion
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
Product
SQL DROP COLUMN and ADD COLUMN: adding and removing columns in SQL
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