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Building a payment processing system is hard and managing people’s money and personal data comes with a lot of risk. The fintech industry is extremely competitive and it’s no longer acceptable to make tradeoffs when building your infrastructure. For most organizations, a payment system is a tier 0 service essential for operations. Downtime is a huge liability. Scaling can be a difficult technical challenge. And what about guaranteeing consistent transactions at scale?

Cassie McAllister

June 8, 2023

In a distributed database, a hotspot is an overworked node – in other words, a part of the database that’s processing a greater share of the total workload than it is meant to handle.

Charlie Custer

June 7, 2023

With the rapid adoption of Kubernetes in organizations and the push to standardize the orchestration of resources with this approach, databases are now also being deployed into Kubernetes. Historically, persistent workloads like databases were not recommended to be deployed into Kubernetes because it was complex to manage how data would be stored. This was a result of Kubernetes originally being designed for non-persistent microservice architectures. However, in more recent times new database vendors are emerging with software built from the ground up to run in this environment.

CDC Queries are SQL-like statements that allow you to (1) filter (2) transform (3) and choose the schema of your data stream. Instead of the headaches of sidecar services or downstream tools, filtering and transforming streaming data is now as simple as a SQL query. Here is a quick video tutorial about how to use CDC Queries that accounts for all the new functionality as of the CockroachDB 23.1 release:

We’re giving CockroachDB’s interactive SQL shell a face lift in v23.1! The SQL shell is the interactive read-eval-print loop (REPL) bundled inside CockroachDB under the command cockroach sql. It is also available as the standalone and more modestly sized cockroach-sql downloadable program, as well as our development tool cockroach demo.

In CockroachDB v23.1, we are introducing a new feature which enables external SQL query editors to provide contextual suggestions on SQL syntax to developers. As a proof of concept, we have integrated this feature in CockroachDB’s own interactive SQL shell to provide a long and often requested UX enhancement: tab completion!

Large enterprises with hundreds of developers building thousands of applications and services have a suite of database options to choose from. They also typically have a full team dedicated to maintaining these offerings. The saying “use the best tool for the job” is why they offer so many options, since different workloads have different requirements. Over the past few years, the “best tools” have changed because of the increasing demand on infrastructure generated by business-critical, high-volume, workloads.

Cassie McAllister

May 18, 2023

When people think about improving application performance, they’re often thinking of cleaning up the code in the application layer. However, the database layer can also be optimized to improve application performance, and so can the ways in which these two layers – application and database – interact with each other.

Charlie Custer

May 18, 2023

In this post Rob and I explain how we built Silo, a fully functioning multi-region Next.js application combining CockroachDB multi-region serverless and a multi-region Node.js (Lambda) API backed by a Geographically aware Route 53 Hosted Zone. Both the API and CockroachDB have been deployed to AWS. The Next.js app has been deployed using Vercel. There are a number of reasons why you’d want to choose a multi-region strategy; to optimize latency, maintain high availability and, in some cases, to comply with regional regulations. But, rather than tell you about the benefits, I’d like to show you.

Rob Reid

May 17, 2023