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More than 500 attendees from around the globe recently swarmed into New York for RoachFest23, the annual user conference for CockroachDB customers. The two day event featured thirty speakers from some of the world’s leading enterprise companies including engineering leads and directors at Santander, DoorDash, City Storage Systems (also known as Cloud Kitchens), Booking.com, Fortinet, and many more. The Cockroach Labs co-founders also led sessions, shared the future of CockroachDB, and released new features and capabilities now available in CockroachDB.

Michelle Gienow

October 19, 2023

High CPU usage can bring your database – and with it, your application – grinding to a halt. This is, unfortunately, a fairly common problem. But it also can be a relatively easy fix. Let’s take a look at how to check CPU usage in Postgres, and how to troubleshoot for some of the most common causes of high CPU usage.

Charlie Custer

October 16, 2023

Nearly every business has tier 0 applications that are critical for delivering their services to customers: these are the applications that make the money. Any disruption or downtime can result in significant financial losses and damage to a company’s reputation. Adopting multi-region application architecture mitigates these risks and ensures high availability. In this blog post, we will explore the concept of multi-region application architecture and discuss how it helps in risk mitigation while providing high availability.

Michelle Gienow

October 11, 2023

The cloud is, by definition, a distributed system. Distributed application architecture is mainstream in the world of software — you wouldn’t build any other way. For more than a decade, though, the database has lagged behind. The architecture of traditional relational databases frequently conflicts with the architectural needs of modern cloud applications: horizontal scale, elasticity, and microservices.

Charlie Custer

October 9, 2023

When people talk about multi-region architecture, it’s often in the context of operational resilience. And that’s certainly a valid use case in a world where cloud region failures aren’t uncommon. But resilience is not the only reason to consider multi-region architecture. Fast-growing companies should also consider the virtues of multi-cloud deployments for market expansion.

Charlie Custer

October 5, 2023

Each October, RoachFest gathers together application owners, architects, engineers, and operators running their data-intensive workloads on CockroachDB (along with other innovators who are exploring doing the same). This conference centers on our users: attendees share their work, meet their peers, and learn first-hand from the builders behind the database. They’re also the first to hear about our latest product and feature releases, and the new capabilities they unlock for users.

Raft is a consensus algorithm used in distributed systems to ensure that data is replicated safely and consistently. That sentence alone can be confusing. Hopefully the analogy in this post can help people understand how it works. In honor of national Mean Girls day (“on October 3rd he asked me what day it was”), I present the Raft Consensus Algorithm as explained through the movie Mean Girls. (For a great, more technical overview of Raft, we recommend The Secret Lives of Data).

In this article, we’ll take a look at how to safely add and drop columns from a SQL database using ALTER TABLE … ADD and ALTER TABLE … DROP COLUMN. We will also briefly touch on adding and dropping constraints on SQL tables, since that functions in the same way and since it’s important to consider constraints anyway when you’re adding columns to a table.

Charlie Custer

October 2, 2023

We’re pleased to announce that Crain’s has ranked Cockroach Labs #1 in the large companies category of its 2023 Best Places to Work in New York City list. This is the fourth year in a row Cockroach Labs has received this ranking in the large category. The past year has been an evolution for Cockroach Labs. We grew in size, maturity, and knowledge. We welcomed our new President and CRO, Jason Forget and opened up our Austin office and India location. The strength and resilience of our community continue to be the bond that propels us forward.

Lindsay Grenawalt

September 28, 2023