In discussions of application architecture, the name Kafka comes up quite frequently. But if you haven’t worked with event-driven systems that rely on real-time data before, you might not be familiar with it.

Charlie Custer

December 22, 2022

Efficiency matters. When you’re working with large amounts of data, it matters a lot. Every trip between your application and the database incurs real costs, both in terms of time and money. So how can you minimize those trips?

Charlie Custer

December 5, 2022

In case you hadn’t already heard, Heroku is shutting down its free plans. The change has left many developers scrambling to replace what Heroku offered with other free services. And while CockroachDB doesn’t replace everything Heroku’s free tier offered, developers looking to replace the free cloud Postgres database that Heroku offered can already access an excellent replacement in CockroachDB serverless, a forever-free cloud database that actually offers some major advantages over Heroku Postgres.

Charlie Custer

November 17, 2022

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

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

For Devsisters, Cookie Run: Kingdom has been a particularly tasty success. The game has amassed more than ten million downloads, and handles hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. At peak traffic hours, it is sometimes processing 60,000 transactions per second. In this blog we’ll get into the architecture that supports a viral video game platform.

Charlie Custer

October 19, 2022

Building a payment system is a challenging proposition. The potential pitfalls can be subtle, and the price for getting something wrong is high. Shipt is a company that has obviously gotten it right. You probably know Shipt as a grocery delivery service, but the ecommerce company has several other businesses and fulfills all of the orders placed on its parent company Target’s website.

Charlie Custer

October 12, 2022

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

While many companies have long since moved their application data and analytics data into the cloud, operational data has lagged a bit behind. There are a variety of reasons for this, but a primary one is that operational data is often both sensitive (containing PII) and mission-critical. Many companies are hesitant to fix something that, from their perspective, has not been broken, and hesitant to put critical data into the hands of people outside the company. This mindset is changing fast, though. While the old model may not be fully broken for everyone, it is breaking. For one thing, in 2022 the old way has simply become too expensive. And managed cloud database options are maturing, addressing some of the performance and security concerns that early adopters once had about them.

Charlie Custer

September 13, 2022