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My current employer uses sharded and replicated Postgres via RDS. Even basic things like deploying schema changes to every shard are an unbelievable pain in the ass, and changing the number of shards on a major database is a high-touch, multi-day operation. After having worked with Spanner in the past, it’s like going back to the stone age, like we’re only a step above babysitting individual machines in a closet. Nobody should do this. — HackerNews user GeneralMayhem

Michelle Gienow

April 12, 2023

So you need to scale. That’s a good problem to have! But should you scale up or scale out? There’s no easy answer, so let’s take a closer look at horizontal scaling vs. vertical scaling , how they compare, and what the pros and cons are for each approach.

Charlie Custer

April 10, 2023

Do you remember December 7, 2021? If you work in ops, you might – that’s one of the recent examples of a major public cloud region encountering serious issues, and breaking a large number of popular applications, from Disney+ to Ticketmaster, in the process. The outage was resolved, as they always are. But this, and other incidents like it, lay bare that even though the major public clouds can all offer solid uptime, relying on just one of them can still be costly. Even a short outage once every few years can cost millions when you’re operating at scale. According to a 2022 study from analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and AIOps company BigPanda, the average cost of downtime is $12,900 per minute. For large enterprises, the costs are even higher – often millions of dollars per hour, and that’s before you factor in all of the indirect costs such as reputational damage. That’s just one of the reasons why most companies are moving to or considering multi-cloud deployments.

In this post you’ll learn about the CockroachDB Cloud API and how I’ve used it to create an application Dashboard with Next.js. Using the API you can build a custom interface to meet your organization’s needs, or perform various tasks relating to your database infrastructure. I’ll also explain how I’ve used NextAuth.js to create conditional authorization rules to facilitate greater control over the functionality. You can get a feel for what I’ve built using the links below. 🚀 Preview: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/demos/demo-cloud-api/ ⚙️ GitHub: https://github.com/cockroachdb/demo-cloud-api/

Paul Scanlon

April 5, 2023

Before the dominance of the cloud, calculating the cost of a database was a pretty simple equation: software costs + hardware costs = database costs. If you chose an open source product, the software cost might melt away. While the cloud has fundamentally changed how we consume and deploy software, too many people are still using this outdated calculation. The truth is, there are a lot more things to consider when pricing out the total cost of a database. The hardware and software costs are still there, but you also need to think about the price of scaling the database, of integrating with your existing and future systems, and of planned–or unplanned–downtime.

Dan Kelly

April 4, 2023

Database practitioners are always in pursuit of new ways to streamline operating costs. The total cost of database ownership can be broken down essentially into the license cost, the storage cost, and the compute cost. There are dozens of other soft and hard costs that are well worth considering and are covered in depth in this cost of ownership report, but the focus in this blog is the reduction of storage costs.

Alex Entin

March 31, 2023

In this post we’re going to talk about one of the techniques that can be used in CockroachDB for getting good performance from databases accessed from multiple geographical regions: follower reads. These are operations presenting a slightly stale view of data, which can be served with local latencies from different regions.

I once went to a website that had “hours of operation,” and was only “open” when its brick and mortar counterpart had its lights on. I felt perplexed and a little frustrated; computers are capable of running all day every day, so why shouldn’t they? I’d been habituated to the internet’s incredible availability guarantees. However, before the internet, 24/7 high availability wasn’t “a thing.” Availability was desirable, but not something to which we felt fundamentally entitled. We used computers only when we needed them; they weren’t waiting idly by on the off-chance a request came by. As the internet grew, those previously uncommon requests at 3am local time became prime business hours partway across the globe, and making sure that a computer could facilitate the request was important.

Jessica Edwards

March 23, 2023

At Cockroach Labs, the past year has been filled with some extraordinary transformations. Today I’m pleased to mark another milestone, as we showcase our business acceleration and expansion, customer growth, and a new addition to our executive team. We started this company as a small team frustrated with the lack of sophisticated database technology in the open source ecosystem. Since then, CockroachDB has helped some of the world’s best companies power their mission-critical workloads with a level of sophistication worthy of the promise of the global cloud. It has been exhilarating to see CockroachDB evolve into a product adopted by innovators in the Fortune 500.

Spencer Kimball

March 22, 2023