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NOT NULL constraints are a ubiquitous tool for upholding data integrity. However, their performance benefits are less obvious. NOT NULL constraints provide a query optimizer with additional context that unlocks optimizations that significantly reduce query latency. In this post we’ll examine a few of these optimizations that transform query plans involving foreign key relationships.

Marcus Gartner

June 27, 2023

At Netflix, data movement and data processing are essential functions that present significant challenges because of the vastness of their data architecture. There are so many different data sources to keep in sync and so many different consumers of the data that need accurate (and often) real-time access. Solving these challenges requires some clever engineering gymnastics that we’ll get to below. The content for this blog comes from a conversation between Netflix Senior Engineer, Vlad Sydorenko, and our own Director of Engineering, Jordan Lewis, in which they unpack how Netflix moves and processes data that comes from CockroachDB. (If you want to get to know Vlad a little bit you can check out this short interview.) The insights gleaned from their event-driven system help drive important business decisions that create better user experiences and substantial value for the company. Those insights are possible because of the data mesh that connects different sources, defines a pipeline, and makes the data accessible and useful.

Dan Kelly

June 22, 2023

Exporting data is a crucial tool in any database user’s toolkit. In CockroachDB, the EXPORT command has long provided this essential functionality to: Move data to a different data store for business analytics Migrate data to a new database Archive data in a platform-neutral way Seed an application with data Say, for example, you need to export a sizable amount of JSON to seed a core data store for a streaming service. Sometimes you can pre-seed this data alongside your application with an EXPORT. But if you’re working on the scale of a company like Netflix, EXPORT commands come with some limitations that led us to explore an additional way to export data.

Exporting data is a crucial tool in any database user’s toolkit. In CockroachDB, the EXPORT command has long provided this essential functionality to: - Move data to a different data store for business analytics - Migrate data to a new database - Archive data in a platform-neutral way - Seed an application with data Say, for example, you need to export a sizable amount of JSON to seed a core data store for a streaming service. Sometimes you can pre-seed this data alongside your application with an EXPORT. But if you’re working on the scale of a company like Netflix, EXPORT commands come with some limitations that led us to explore an additional way to export data.

In an ideal world, all workloads are perfect and never face performance issues. In the real world, that’s hard to achieve. Your workload might not always follow best practices, or it could contain problematic queries that cause trouble.

Marylia Gutierrez

June 21, 2023

CREWS (Cockroach Employees Who Support) are groups intended to create an inclusive environment for Roachers (Cockroach Labs employees) from underrepresented backgrounds and help employees connect with their peers on a deeper level. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at one such group: Roacher Pride

Charlie Custer

June 20, 2023

We are thrilled to announce that CockroachDB dedicated, the fully managed single-tenant version of CockroachDB, is now HIPAA-ready and can be used to safely store protected health information (PHI). Any organization working in healthcare needs to comply with HIPAA requirements to protect sensitive patient data, regardless of whether they’re a “covered entity” (hospital, health insurance plan, pharmacy, etc.) or “business associate” (an organization that works with a covered entity).

CockroachDB has lots of customers who’ve switched from Oracle and other legacy SQL databases, saving both money and time. Generally speaking, though, we can’t share their names or specific details about their internal processes and workloads. So in this article we’ll be doing something a bit different. We wanted to tell the story of what it’s like for a finance company to transition from Oracle to CockroachDB. The names and quotes in this narrative are fictional, but the story itself is real. It comes from the things we’ve heard working with real-world customers in the finance industry – including Fortune 50 banks – who are moving transactional workloads off of Oracle and onto CockroachDB.

Charlie Custer

June 15, 2023

During the Winter of 2023, I had the wonderful opportunity to work as a Software Engineering Intern on the SQL Queries team at Cockroach Labs. During the scope of this internship, I found myself working with indexes and specifically implementing forward indexes on columns storing JSONB, which resulted in speeding up query execution time by up to 98% in some cases! This blog post will go over the motivations for the implementation of these indexes, the main challenges that came up with the implementation, and some demonstrations of the staggering results.