Let’s be real: while there’s nothing wrong with a nice GUI, doing things with the command line is just faster. At least once you know what you’re doing. That’s why in CockroachDB 22.1, we’ve added a new tool that’s designed to make it faster and easier than ever to create and manage CockroachDB clusters right from the command line: ccloud.

Charlie Custer

June 3, 2022

CockroachDB 22.1 is here, and with it comes a highly-requested feature: a REST API that allows you to access and manage your clusters programmatically, rather than having to navigate the web UI. Want to automate your database ops? Let’s get started!

Charlie Custer

May 25, 2022

When you’re standing up a quick prototype of a web application, you probably don’t think much about how your database will scale. But in the long run, scale matters. And while scaling and deploying a highly available relational database used to be both expensive and challenging, today it’s pretty straightforward and completely free. There’s really no reason not to start with a database that’ll scale automatically.

Charlie Custer

May 9, 2022

Imagine walking into this: “About 4 million lines of PHP code, written by underpaid, sometimes not well meaning, freelancers and students over the span of 8 years. The CEO wrote a large part, but stopped learning new techniques around 2004.” That’s how bad tech debt can get when a startup is run without considering that all of those messy shortcuts will eventually have to get cleaned up.

Charlie Custer

March 22, 2022

When you’ve got a great idea for a startup, application architecture is probably one of the last things on your mind. But architecting your app right the first time can save you major headaches further down the road. So let’s take a look at a typical startup application architecture, with a particular focus on the database and how the choices that application architects make in that part of their stack can impact scale, user experience, and more.

Charlie Custer

March 16, 2022

Do you love thinking about servers? Most developers don’t. That’s why serverless platforms such as AWS Lambda, which lets you run functions in the cloud without having to think about servers, have become so popular. Running your code in the cloud doesn’t truly free you from thinking about servers unless you’re also using a serverless database, though. Amazon itself offers a serverless database called Amazon Aurora Serverless, but what if you prefer the advantages that CockroachDB offers, or simply want to avoid vendor lock-in with your database in case you choose to migrate to a different cloud in the future?

Charlie Custer

March 8, 2022

“Do things that don’t scale.” That YCombinator mantra may be the single most common piece of advice given to early-stage tech startups. And with good reason – it’s great advice! But if you follow it, with a little luck you’ll reach a point where it no longer applies (at least on a technical level).

Charlie Custer

February 28, 2022

How can you get great performance out of your database when huge numbers of users are going to be submitting queries within the space of a few minutes or seconds?

Charlie Custer

February 18, 2022

Developing a modern application means developing for the cloud, with uptime, scalability, geographic distribution, and low latency at the forefront of concerns. This has led to the widespread adoption of application architectures based on event-driven microservices. Breaking the elements of an application down into microservices allows us to (for example) scale different services independently. It is simply the most efficient way to architect applications for the cloud. However, embracing event-driven microservices also presents some challenges. With so many different services in motion at the same time, communication between them can become a challenge.

Charlie Custer

January 18, 2022