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Secure authentication is a fundamental requirement when evaluating a database product. Architecture and Security teams prefer capabilities which could somehow be managed centrally, ideally using existing security tools in the enterprise tech stack. Over decades of advancements in the OLTP database ecosystem, we’ve seen a number of solutions emerge for secure authentication. Whether it be PKI/certificates, LDAP integration with enterprise identity directory, GSSAPI/Kerberos, SCRAM and so on, those mechanisms have enabled organizations to adopt a variety of new databases over time. We also support most of those capabilities in CockroachDB that are utilized by the majority of our security-conscious customers.

We’ve been planning a visit to Orange County, California, where I grew up, over the upcoming holidays. My favorite Mexican restaurant is there, in Placentia: Q-Tortas! I have frequent cravings for their carnitas burrito, so a visit there is obligatory (I promise this blog is about search).

Michael Goddard

December 12, 2022

Lt. Grace Hopper at the programming console for the Mark I computer, 1944. Programming the Mark I required feeding in long rolls of paper punched with holes that the computer translated into instructions. Back in the days before startups and GitHub and nerds being cool — long before the Internet, and only shortly after there were “computing machines” at all — Grace Hopper was the first person to see that these room-sized citadels of circuitry could do more than mathematical calculations. Grace Hopper theorized and then wrote the first compiler, essentially “teaching” computers to speak English and thereby ushering in the world of computing that we know today.

Michelle Gienow

December 8, 2022

Efficiency matters. When you’re working with large amounts of data, it matters a lot. Every trip between your application and the database incurs real costs, both in terms of time and money. So how can you minimize those trips?

Charlie Custer

December 5, 2022

Modern hyper-growth merchants do not want to manage complex payment system architecture. They want to expand network tokenization offerings and make their systems more automated and API driven. Merchants like SeatGeek, for example, want to build a ticket sales system that makes payment processing simple and performant for their end users. The challenge for merchants like SeatGeek is that they need to adopt modern tools and push for automation while also continuing to meet all the standard data protection requirements of the financial services industry. At the most fundamental level, when merchants migrate from single datacenter architecture to a cloud-native, distributed architecture the data has to stay safe (at rest and in flight) and consistent. It requires a specific set of tools to meet fintech security standards while also modernizing the tech stack and distributing the data. That’s exactly the journey that Spreedly embarked on when they decided to migrate their payments orchestration service from a legacy database to CockroachDB.

Dan Kelly

November 20, 2022

In case you hadn’t already heard, Heroku is shutting down its free plans. The change has left many developers scrambling to replace what Heroku offered with other free services. And while CockroachDB doesn’t replace everything Heroku’s free tier offered, developers looking to replace the free cloud Postgres database that Heroku offered can already access an excellent replacement in CockroachDB serverless, a forever-free cloud database that actually offers some major advantages over Heroku Postgres.

Charlie Custer

November 17, 2022

As retailers gear up for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, they will not be caught flat footed by the tidal wave of ecommerce sales. Lessons were learned during the unprecedented digital traffic during the pandemic. Retailers are taking new approaches such as shifting to a “Cyber Month” in order to promote deals early to avoid logistical nightmares, and developing lottery systems (like Nugget) to set expectations upfront. Some companies (such as Peloton) are even saying they won’t have a sale at all. Regardless of your strategy, Cyber Monday and associated holiday peak shopping periods will put pressure on your infrastructure. How are you going to handle massive traffic to your ecommerce site and prevent an outage? Will you survive a region failure? Are you confident when giving customers accurate pricing and shipping information? How many transactions can you process in an hour? In this post, we will cover three strategies retailers can employ to exceed customer expectations this holiday shopping season and beyond. (Interestingly, DoorDash just published a blog about how they deal with the challenge of inventory levels changing in real-time. Worth a read.)

Cassie McAllister

November 10, 2022

Achieving low latency reads in a transactionally consistent, multi-region database is a unique challenge. In CockroachDB, two approaches are frequently used: geo-partitioning data so that it is located in the region where it is accessed most frequently, and historical reads, which read slightly stale data from local replicas. However, there is a third approach that is used less frequently because it fits a narrower use case: global tables. Global tables offer low-latency non-stale reads from all regions at the cost of higher write latency, and they can be used in many cases where the workload has a high read to write ratio.

Jon St. John

November 8, 2022

In my technical journey, I struggled to find a simple tool that gave me the flexibility to collect and deliver data to other monitoring tools. Until, one day, I found it.

Julian Hernandez

November 7, 2022