Michelle Gienow
Senior Technical Content WriterMichelle Gienow is a recovering journalist turned front end developer based in Baltimore, MD. She creates content around her central obsessions: Jamstack, distributed architecture and developing a cloud native mindset.
Big Ideas: Top Ten Tips for App Builders in 2024
Michelle Gienow
January 17, 2024
True Tales of Survival: The $500 million dollar typo
It's amazing how a series of small but unfortunate events can quickly add up to one very expensive problem. Like the time one person fat-fingered the wrong year on a mainframe JCL job, Ronald Reagan died, and the US postal service lost $500 million.
Michelle Gienow
January 11, 2024
How Shopmonkey Built a Geo-Aware Auto Care Platform
At RoachFest '23, Shopmonkey Chief Technical Officer Jeff Haynie spoke about the compelling reasons the company moved their core business from Mongo to CockroachDB, and the architectural innovations they implemented to take advantage of CockroachDB’s unique multi-region capabilities.
Michelle Gienow
January 3, 2024
What is CRDB?
CRDB is shorthand for CockroachDB: the scalable, consistently-replicated, distributed SQL database. A single instance of CRDB can scale from a one laptop to thousands of servers distributed all around the world.
Michelle Gienow
December 27, 2023
How to answer the question ‘when are we getting AI?’ without screaming inside
The question comes at you in the hallways, the cafeteria, even the restroom: "Hey, when are WE getting AI???"? It's all anyone wants to talk to you about these days. Here is a handy four-step plan for evaluating and adopting AI so you can satisfy your curious co-workers, instead of simply screaming (on the inside, hopefully).
Michelle Gienow
December 22, 2023
Migrating PostgreSQL to CockroachDB For Multicloud
At RoachFest23, platform engineers Rogger Fabbri and Mario Morgado documented Form3's migration from PostgreSQL and demonstrated the platform's multi-cloud architecture, using CRDB and Kubernetes to span AWS, GCP and Azure with active-active replication to survive any event — even a full cloud outage.
Michelle Gienow
December 13, 2023
True Tales of Survival: Saving your data center with a bucket brigade
True story: It's October, 2012. A company decommissions its DR facility. Days later, Superstorm Sandy hits. You won't believe what happens next!
Michelle Gienow
November 30, 2023
How a sportsbetting and iCasino meets strict regulatory requirements with CockroachDB & AWS Outposts
Architects from Hard Rock Digital shares their journey building a sportsbetting and iCasino that can quickly enter new markets with CockroachDB and AWS Outposts.
Michelle Gienow
November 21, 2023
> ALTER DATABASE FortiSASE SURVIVE REGION FAILURE: Migrating to CockroachDB
At RoachFest23, Fortinet Director of Software Development Louis Jia shared the story of FortiSASE’s migration from CockroachDB SH (self-hosted) to CockroachDB managed services.
Michelle Gienow
November 15, 2023
System
How online schema changes are possible in CockroachDB
I periodically need to make changes to tables. Adding columns is very simple with the ALTER TABLE command… But my tables have up to 40 million rows now, and they are growing fast. So those alter table commands take several hours… Since I’m using Amazon RDS, I can’t have replica servers to play with offline and then promote to primary in prod. So my question is if there’s a way to do this with minimal downtime? I don’t mind an operation taking hours or even days if users can still use the db…” — Stack Overflow, serverfault
Michelle Gienow
November 8, 2023