CockroachDB is designed to deliver bulletproof resilience. But even the world’s safest boat needs to carry life jackets. The same principle applies to your data, which is why we’ve baked a breadth of Backup and Restore capabilities into CockroachDB.

Dan Kelly

February 11, 2021

What you build and how you build it should not be dictated by your database. The tools and frameworks that you’re familiar with should be compatible with your database of choice. This is why modern database solutions have implemented support for third part tools like Pony ORM, Hibernate, GORM, jOOQ and others. Developers are beginning to expect to be able to bend the database to their will. And they should - because the flexibility leads to better applications.

Dan Kelly

February 2, 2021

Back in the bygone era of meeting in person, shaking hands, and clapping enthusiastically for the brave souls who are willing to stand in front of their peers to do live demos, Elasticsearch held a meetup in Boston at Bose headquarters. Chris Chambers, Cloud Engineer at Bose, spoke to the crowd about how his team built a platform as a service using a number of open source tools, including CockroachDB, Elasticsearch, and Kubernetes. Bose really requires no introduction but it bears mentioning that Chris works on a specific team within Bose called Galapagos. The mission of Galapagos is to bring Bose’s software into the 21st century - In the past, Bose was focused on embedded software (software that runs on speakers and headphones) and now that they’ve mastered the art, they have started to modernize so that they can bring cloud-connected experiences to all our devices.

Dan Kelly

January 13, 2021

How is Lyft able to tell you how far away your driver is? How does DoorDash give accurate estimates for the food you just ordered? Both of these satisfying user experiences are possible because of spatial data. In this blog we’ll cover the basics of spatial data and then show some examples of common applications and use cases that use spatial data.

Dan Kelly

November 18, 2020

Every startup has a choice: Begin building with something familiar (Postgres, MySQL…) or begin building with something new (CockroachDB). Using a familiar database means engineers can hit the ground running and begin building on a trustworthy platform. Using a new database will require research, testing, and a period of time for acclimation. On the surface this looks like a simple decision: start building faster with a familiar database. Peel the onion back one more layer and it becomes clear why so many growth-stage companies are deciding to start with CockroachDB rather than Postgres or MySQL.

Dan Kelly

July 7, 2020

Healthcare industry companies count on their database solutions to protect sensitive data and to deliver consistent performance. They also need the database to streamline communication between a complicated backend full of disparate systems. For most of the last 30 years this meant relying on Oracle because Oracle delivers the consistency required in an industry where lives are at stake and data must always be correct. The rise of cloud-native, distributed SQL database technology that offers a high level of consistency and horizontal scale is giving the healthcare industry a more flexible option.

Dan Kelly

June 29, 2020

Back in 2015 the early Cockroach Labs engineers made a decision to write this massive, complex application in Go. Since then we have, on many occassions, discussed our use of Go in blogs and on stage.

Dan Kelly

March 18, 2020

An often overlooked privilege of building database technology is the opportunity to team up with companies that are making a positive impact in the world. For Cockroach Labs, EF (Education First) is one of those companies. Since 1965, Education First has offered a range of educational programs including study abroad, student exchange, educational travel courses and language classes; all in an effort to "open the world through education." Currently, Education First has 612 offices and schools in over 50 different countries. In 2019 it launched a digital learning platform to remove the distance between teachers and students in different countries. The services that Education First provides help to grow the work and travel possibilities for people of all ages from all countries.

Dan Kelly

December 17, 2019

This year, as every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday stressed e-commerce systems to their breaking points. Major companies like H&M, Nordstrom Rack, and other retailers experienced the kinds of costly outages that keep SREs up at night. Multi-cloud infrastructure is sometimes offered as a panacea to these kinds of outages. But multi-cloud deployments are not a band-aid. In fact, they often introduce new complexities into the system that need to be sniffed out. But sniffing out bugs in multi-cloud environments is, by nature, complicated. Ana Medina, a chaos engineer from Gremlin, spoke at ESCAPE/19 about how to do it, including a detailed list of the kinds of errors to search for and checklists of questions to ask.

Dan Kelly

December 9, 2019