As I’ve written before, I had a number of great job opportunities when I was finishing up my PhD at MIT five years ago. Choosing which offer to accept was difficult, but in the end I was confident in my decision to join Cockroach Labs. The fact that I’m still here nearly five years later is an indication that not only did I make the right decision about where to start my post-graduate career, but the company has continued to be a place that both excites and challenges me in ways I didn’t anticipate back then. This blog post describes my journey to Cockroach Labs and why I’m still excited to go to work every day (hint: it has everything to do with people and nothing to do with insects).

The latest research paper from CockroachDB’s engineering team, “A Demonstration of Multi-Region CockroachDB”, will appear in the Demonstration Track of the VLDB 2022 conference in Sydney, Australia (as well as remotely), on September 5-9. This paper complements our recent full paper, Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB, which appeared earlier this year in SIGMOD 2022.

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.

We are pleased to announce that our second paper, Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB, will appear in the Industry Track of the ACM SIGMOD 2022 conference in Philadelphia, PA (as well as remotely), on June 12-17. This paper is the sequel to our SIGMOD 2020 paper in which we introduced CockroachDB’s geo-distributed capabilities to the world.

Over the past few months, a team of our engineers, technical writers, product managers, and sales engineers codified the research and learnings of CockroachDB and are now contributing this knowledge back into the very system from which we have benefited with the hope of further advancing distributed systems research and design. The research paper, "CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database", is a labor of love that we are honored to have published by SIGMOD, the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems.

Last year, we rebuilt our cost-based optimizer from scratch for CockroachDB’s 2.1 release. We’ve been continuing to improve the optimizer since then, and we’ve added a number of new features for the CockroachDB 19.1 release. One of the new features is automatic collection of table statistics. Automatic statistics enables the optimizer to make better decisions when choosing query plans.

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!