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When building a multi-region application, one of the first things to consider is how and where data will be placed. For example, when building a gambling application deployed across the country, you want to make sure users have quick access to their data no matter their location. Gamblers and the platforms they use both need low latency access to real-time data. It can make or break the user experience. This is an easy example because money is won and lost, but the requirement for applications to deliver low latency experiences to a global user base is obviously applicable to every other industry as well.

Upserts are useful for anyone who works with a database to know, but the term “upsert” might not even appear in your DBMS’s documentation! So what is an upsert, anyway? And why might it not be mentioned in your docs?

Charlie Custer

May 8, 2023

A foreign key is a column or columns in a database that (e.g. table_1.column_a) that are linked to a column in a different table (table_2.column_b). The existence of a foreign key column establishes a foreign key constraint – a database rule that ensures that a value can be added or updated in column_a only if the same value already exists in column_b.

Charlie Custer

May 4, 2023

Disasters are expensive. Hilariously expensive. In my career as a software engineer, I’ve employed a bunch of technologies and witnessed most of them - in some way - fail and cause downtime. Downtime (and the thought of downtime), alongside Toilet Time Debugging™, are among the endless reasons a Software Engineer may struggle to switch off.

Rob Reid

May 2, 2023

Fintech companies are modernizing how they store and process institutional and retail trades. To understand how, we must first take a quick look at why – what these companies used to do, and why that approach is no longer considered acceptable.

Would you fly in an aircraft that wasn’t tested? Get behind the wheel of a car whose model hadn’t been crash-tested? What about using a distributed database for storing your mission critical data that hadn’t been tested and gone through quality assurance? I’d happily wager that if you are a database developer, then anyone that makes use of your database - whether that be directly (developer or database administrator), or indirectly (you, as the end-user of a product that most likely makes use of a database) - is going to feel a whole lot better when you tell them that you test the database. Testing is a fundamental and well accepted part of building functional software.

One caveat before we dive into this comparison of CockroachDB and Google Cloud Spanner: I am not a Spanner expert. I have studied their documentation, tried the product and know their use cases well enough to state that Spanner is an amazing database. In this blog I am not going to unpack all the architectural details of Spanner as that would be a much longer post and I simply would not feel comfortable doing so. I’m going to point out interesting areas in which CockroachDB is distinct from Spanner. Here’s a short video in case you’d rather consume the information that way:

Jim Walker

April 24, 2023

CockroachDB is an excellent system of record, but no technology exists in a vacuum. Some of our users would like to keep their data mirrored in full-text indexes to power natural language search. Others want to use analytics engines and big data pipelines to run huge queries without impacting production traffic. Still others want to send mobile push notifications in response to data changes without doing the bookkeeping themselves.

Nearly every organization has critical systems that need to be up at least 99.99% of the time. Typically, these systems need to recover from downtime in seconds with no data loss while serving vital customers located across an entire country, many countries, or even continents.