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It’s 10 o’clock. Do you know where your data is? Chances are, it’s nestled snugly in its database. But chances are that it’s also less secure than you might think. Even in sophisticated systems with backups and failover plans, data loss is possible. And importantly, it can happen without you realizing it’s even possible – at least, not until it’s too late.

Charlie Custer

June 13, 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.

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:

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!

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.

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