At Cockroach Labs, we’ve spent a lot of time getting our SQL semantics to match PostgreSQL as much as possible - all so that you can use the awesome PostgreSQL language with a powerful, distributed backend like! Getting this right involves getting the Time, TimeTZ, Timestamp and TimestampTZ types right - which has proven quite the quest! Numerous bugs have been filed and fixed - and with it, our mastery of these types in PostgreSQL (and the Go time library) has increased! In this blog post, we’ll explore some intricacies we’ve found with these data types in PostgreSQL, and look at how we reproduce some of these features using Go and its ecosystem. We’ll share our recommendations for using these types along the way.

Follower reads are a key feature that developers wanting to use multi-region databases should understand. We originally introduced them in this blog post, and later documented their use here. In this post, we’ll quickly review the basics of follower reads, highlight some potential issues, and propose a new type of follower reads that we’re exploring to address those issues: bounded staleness reads.

As we outlined in Deploy a Multi-Region Application in Just 3 Steps, we’ve made major changes to simplify the multi-region configuration in CockroachDB. The new abstractions allow users to think of multi-region databases and tables in three ways:

Do you enjoy weird and strange build issues? Or do you think something we do in this blog post is fishy and you want to fix it? Want us to use bazel instead? Good news - we’ve got a role for you! We’re on the lookout for more engineers on our Developer Infrastructure team! We’re looking to expand our sprawling development infrastructure as we grow to more people and a bigger codebase with new and exciting functionality and cloud management. If you want to help the engineers write the exciting next generation of databases by empowering their work environment, don’t delay - apply today!

G’day! I’m Oliver, a Member of Technical Staff here at Cockroach Labs. After spending the better part of 5 years in the United States, I decided to come back home to Sydney, Australia. With my homecoming, I’m happy to announce that Cockroach Labs is hiring people to work with us from Sydney, Australia! If you’re curious about me, my journey, and why I’m at Cockroach, read on. Of course, if the news of an opening sounds good, you can jump straight to the job openings we have in Sydney.

CockroachDB was conceived as open source software, and we are proud that CockroachDB remains open source to this day. Throughout our journey, our community has made valuable contributions to our product. Over the course of our existence, we have had over 1590 commits from over 320 external contributors across all our open source repositories. Today, we want to thank all our wonderful external contributors. In this blog post, we celebrate open source contributions across the CockroachDB repositories, with a glimpse of how we manage contributions to our own repo. We take a closer look at the impact of external contributions on the spatial offering for v20.2 and CockroachDB ORMs. We also take a look at how we encouraged first-time open source contributors during Hacktoberfest 2020. Finally, we recognize all our external contributors and celebrate their work.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the motivations behind the REGIONAL BY ROW abstraction, take a deeper dive into the abstraction itself, and look behind the scenes to understand how REGIONAL BY ROW works under the covers. We also have a hands-on demo for you to try out at the end, so you can play around with a toy multi-region cluster yourself!