The other week, we devoted an episode of The Cockroach Hour to talk about the dirty secret of isolation levels. When host Jim Walker was titling the webinar, I’m pretty sure he had one particular “secret” in mind: dirty reads. But the conversation kicked off with discussion of an even more pervasive secret: most developers don’t pay attention to isolation levels. Guests Tim Veil and John Sheaffer, both Solutions Engineers at Cockroach Labs, have decades of experience developing against and working with–and for–all sorts of databases. And both of them admitted that for years, they weren’t paying enough attention to what was happening with their applications' consistency models and isolation levels.

Gartner predicts that by 2022, 75% of all databases will be deployed in the cloud. The findings shouldn’t come as a surprise: on-premise data centers are slowly being phased out as companies realize the many benefits to running a database in the cloud.

In December 2019, we published the 2020 Cloud Report and an accompanying blog post, which summarized original research we conducted benchmarking the performance of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

As of jOOQ's 3.13.0 release, jOOQ fully supports CockroachDB. The CockroachDB SQL dialect is now fully supported for future jOOQ and CockroachDB versions.

``` Django includes a full-featured ORM that simplifies interactions with a database--it’s one of the reasons it’s become one of the most popular web frameworks. Even so, you’re still left to manage scale yourself, and ensure the database is resilient and always on. That can be really hard to do with common Django databases like Postgres, SQLite, and MySQL. And that’s why today, we’re excited to announce a new CockroachDB backend for the Django ORM. ``` Using CockroachDB and Django gives you the ease of writing in Python while getting all the benefits of an open source, distributed SQL database. CockroachDB shards automatically, is naturally resilient, and is highly available. Here’s how to get started:

Cloud services abstract away a lot of complexities involved in data center provisioning. Usually, we think of this as a good thing. It’s a huge boon to developer productivity, lowers overhead costs, and allows individual developers and small companies to experiment and grow like never before. But as Rob Reid spoke about at ESCAPE/19, this abstraction obfuscates some darker elements of data center provisioning. Like it or not, cloud computing has real ethical costs attached to it, and due to the “service” part of “cloud services”, we won’t see those costs unless we actively look for them. Reid is a principal engineer at LUSH Digital, and his team has been actively looking at those costs for quite some time now. While he doesn’t purport to have all the answers, his talk on what he’s calling “The Ethical Cloud” invites companies to start asking some of the thornier questions, he spoke openly about these abstractions at ESCAPE/19.

Since 2017, Cockroach Labs has run thousands of benchmark tests across dozens of machine types with the goal of better understanding performance across cloud providers. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in our experiments, it’s this: benchmarking the clouds is a continuous process. Since results fluctuate as the clouds adopt new hardware, it’s important to regularly re-evaluate your configuration (and cloud vendor).

A global electronic lock company wanted to upgrade their identity access management (IAM) system to achieve global scale with no manual sharding. They wanted to move away from sharding and evolve the app’s architecture from monolithic to microservices. With no in-house site reliability team, they started evaluating database-as-a-service (DBaaS) products.

Last week, our friends at Flowable released Flowable 6.4.2, which officially adds support for CockroachDB. Flowable provides a workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) platform for developers, system admins and business users, and now integrates with CockroachDB in just a few steps, thanks to a recent collaboration. Cockroach Labs and Flowable engineers have been teaming up since the early stages of CockroachDB because it makes deploying Flowable that much easier. Plus, as they write in their blog, “What makes CockroachDB very interesting for Flowable is that it’s scalable and distributed database... In the world of processes and cases, atomicity is utmost importance, as data correctness is sacred.”