Like many industries, the financial services business is undergoing dramatic change. In response to the whole world going digital and the explosion of data available to drive decision making and customer experiences, banks are pursuing aggressive innovation in new applications and cloud infrastructure.

Spencer Kimball

November 5, 2020

Many of our employees, customers, partners, and the communities where we work and live are hurting. The Black community in America has already suffered disproportionately from COVID-19 through illness and unemployment. Exacerbating this, we are extremely saddened by the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others across the United States. The murder of George Floyd has, again, highlighted the desperate need for police reform and racial justice in this country.

Spencer Kimball

June 4, 2020

To the Cockroach Labs community, These are unprecedented times. We are all dealing with tremendous change and uncertainty as the impacts of COVID-19 reverberate around the world. We hope you, your team, and your families are and remain safe.

Spencer Kimball

April 6, 2020

GDPR went into effect less than a year ago. And still, the era of conducting global business with limited legislative obstructions already feels like some free-spirited, far away past. Right now the global landscape of data protection law is littered with obstacles and exceptions. GDPR has been the loudest but there are plenty of other regions and countries with regulations in place. Even within the E.U., countries like Germany and Switzerland have their own unique protection regulations. Russia and China have very draconian laws, and they're changing quickly. There are around 120 countries now with data protection laws in place.

Spencer Kimball

February 26, 2019

This week we’re pleased to announce the availability of Managed CockroachDB, the fully hosted and fully managed service created and run by Cockroach Labs that makes deploying, scaling, and managing CockroachDB effortless. Managed CockroachDB is cloud agnostic and available at launch on both AWS and GCP. The goal is simple: allow your development team to focus on building highly scalable applications without worrying about infrastructure operations.

Spencer Kimball

October 30, 2018

In August, we published a blog post entitled “Why Can’t I Run a 100-Node CockroachDB Cluster?”. The post outlined difficulties we encountered stabilizing CockroachDB. CockroachDB stability (or the lack of) had become significant enough that we designated it a “code yellow” issue, a concept borrowed from Google that means a problem is so pressing that it merits promotion to a primary concern of the company. For us, the code yellow was more than warranted; a database program isn’t worth the bytes to store its binary if it lacks stability. In this post, I’ll set the stage with some background, then cover hypotheses for root causes of instability, our communication strategy, some interesting technical details, outcomes for stabilization efforts, and conclusions. It’s a long post, so bear with me!

Spencer Kimball

November 16, 2016

CockroachDB is designed to be a scalable, survivable, and strongly consistent SQL database. Building a distributed system with these capabilities is a big task. Beyond the required functionality, it must also be correct, performant, and stable, or it isn’t worth the bits used to copy the binary.

Spencer Kimball

August 25, 2016

``` We introduced Cockroach Labs last June with a simple yet ambitious mission: Make Data Easy. ``` We’ve spent the intervening months moving CockroachDB from an alpha stage product to launching CockroachDB beta. In the process, the team has nearly tripled in size and development has accelerated to a blistering pace. We’ve supplemented our original investment led by Peter Fenton of Benchmark with an additional round of funding, led by Mike Volpi of Index Ventures. We’re lucky to also count GV (formerly Google Ventures), Sequoia, FirstMark, and Work–Bench as investors.

Spencer Kimball

March 30, 2016

If you’ve ever “watched” a busy GitHub repository, your email inbox has discovered what it feels like to step in front of a firehose. If the project in question has active code reviewers, the problem is often worse by an order of magnitude. Every comment yields another email to all watchers. The CockroachDB repository’s weekly average is at 81 pull requests and 440 notification-generating comments. Most of us who once paid close attention to incoming changes have since lost the ability to do so; these days, monitoring the stream requires a superhuman effort. The mere mortals among us can only pay attention to the pull requests we’ve authored or are tasked with reviewing. What’s surprising is that the watching functionality provided by GitHub is so coarse-grained. The dial apparently only has settings for “0” and “11”.

Spencer Kimball

March 23, 2016