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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

This post was originally published in 2018 by former CockroachDB engineer Matt Jibson, who owns goats and makes his own soap. It’s one of the most popular blogs we’ve ever published so we wanted to get it back up on the site for a new crop of blog readers.

This post was originally published on November 3, 2015, the year Cockroach Labs was founded. Eight years and 85,670 GitHub commits later, it’s still absolutely true: Go was the “write stuff” for CockroachDB. The first question many developers ask us is what our experience has been writing a distributed database in Go, a garbage-collected language. JVM garbage collection is notoriously expensive, so wouldn’t we be risking CockroachDB’s performance by building it in Go? The fact is, when you’re building a high-performance distributed system you’ve only got a handful of languages to choose from, with C++, Java, and Go topping the list. Java’s known performance issues made it unappealing. And, though many of us spent our careers developing in C++, the effort required to build our own libraries further complicated the already daunting task of writing a distributed database. Next on the list was Go.

Jessica Edwards

September 26, 2023

After publishing \\[a post about why we chose Go for CockroachDB](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/why-go-was-the-right-choice-for-cockroachdb/), we received questions about how we deal with some of Go’s known issues — especially those related to performance, garbage collection, and deadlocks.

Jessica Edwards

September 26, 2023

It’s my favorite time of year. The leaves are turning. The temps are dropping. The clusters are multiplying. Which can only mean one thing: KubeCon NA is just around the corner, bringing with it another edition of KubeCrash, the Chicago warm-up!

Lisa-Marie Namphy

September 25, 2023