*June 2023 Update - As of CockroachDB 23.1 our serverless deployment now has multi-region capabilities. You can read more detail in our documentation. A year ago the leaves were turning and we wrote, “serverless databases are the future”. Well, now serverless databases are the present. It’s true that the serverless database will continue to mature towards its eventual destiny as an API endpoint in the cloud. But the serverless version of CockroachDB is now generally available with advanced capabilities like change data capture (CDC), backup and restore, a management API, and a 99.99% uptime SLA.

Dan Kelly

October 4, 2022

Choosing the right metadata store should be contingent on your system architecture. There is no definitive ‘right choice’. But if you are building your products or services on top of distributed systems then your choices are certainly narrowed. Recently, the data security company Rubrik, wrote a three-part blog series about how they chose a metadata store for Rubrik CDM. Their journey began with Cassandra and ended with CockroachDB. This blog is a summary of the challenges they ran into with Cassandra, the reasons they chose CockroachDB as their metadata store, and what their CockroachDB use case looks like.

Dan Kelly

June 3, 2022

If you use a database, at some point you’ll need to modify your schema design. Maybe you need to store new kinds of information. Perhaps you’ll add a field to a table or even need to change a primary key. Regardless of the reason, application requirements tend to change over time - and you’ll need to migrate. We know how important schema modification is, which is why we’ve built zero-downtime online schema changes and online primary key changes into CockroachDB.

Dan Kelly

March 25, 2022

We’ve been building for this for three years, said Naveen Molloy, COO of Bitski, a startup company based in San Francisco that has suddenly found itself at the center of the NFT craze. While most of us were startled to find out that fungible is not a microorganism, and that an NFT can sell for $6.6 million, Bitski had been ready and waiting for the moment. They observed the popularity of digital assets years ago in the virtual world gaming industry. They saw the challenges presented by blockchain transactions. And they built a platform to process blockchain transactions faster. CockroachDB Engineer Nathan Stilwell interviewed Bitski’s CTO Patrick Tescher and COO Naveen Malloy to discuss NFT basics, Ethereum, and the NFT marketplace, as well as the challenges of processing blockchain transactions.

Dan Kelly

March 18, 2022

The concept of a database existed before there were computers. Some of you are even old enough to remember the filing cabinets in which your parents kept health records, tax documents, and old family recipes. The first computer database was built in the 1960s, but the history of databases as we know them, really begins in 1970.

Dan Kelly

February 24, 2022

Today I tried signing into MyChart because I got an email notification about a new statement (ugh). The log-in experience was so slow (seconds) that I immediately closed the window and went back to my daily life. I’ll probably never log in again. Point being, a bad user experience is sometimes the last user experience. For growth-focused companies the priority right out of the gates is user experience. They know it needs to be great or they won’t collect enough users and enough revenue (or VC money) to go and build out the feature rich application of their dreams. One obstacle that stands in the way of user experience is the speed of light. It’s too slow (hot take!). The human perceives anything under 100 milliseconds as “instant”. Anything over 200 milliseconds can feel kind of laggy (which leads to people like me never logging into their MyChart).

Dan Kelly

February 3, 2022

Every day Lush processes hundreds of thousands of transactions in over 950 stores located across 49 different countries. Consistency is important. And inventory management can create extraordinary opportunities when the right tools are used to deliver real-time data insights. In this blog, we’ll cover what Lush’s inventory management architecture looked like before CockroachDB and what they’re able to accomplish with CockroachDB.

Dan Kelly

January 25, 2022

In two hours (the same amount of time it takes to binge two episodes of The Witcher) you will build a ride-sharing application with Node.js and CockroachDB. That’s the beauty of this Node.js and CockroachDB fundamentals course just released by Cockroach University: You get real-life, hands on experience with the tools you need to build modern applications. Experience with modern application architectures, and with distributed databases in particular, is becoming a regular requirement for open roles at great companies like Roblox, Accenture, Netflix, Apple, and others. This Node.js course is a quick way to gain the requisite experience so that you can demonstrate your distributed systems skills in an interview.

Dan Kelly

July 14, 2021

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there has been a massive traffic spike in everything digital--from online shopping to remote learning. Under the hood, companies responsible for these technologies have had to quickly adapt to handle the growth in users. Having an elastically scalable and cloud-native stack--all the way down to the database--has helped ease this transition. One such company that experienced a pandemic-driven surge in popularity was UNIwise, an education tech company based in Denmark that sells an online test platform called WISEflow.

Dan Kelly

February 19, 2021