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“Do things that don’t scale.” That YCombinator mantra may be the single most common piece of advice given to early-stage tech startups. And with good reason – it’s great advice! But if you follow it, with a little luck you’ll reach a point where it no longer applies (at least on a technical level).

Charlie Custer

February 28, 2022

The concept of a database existed before there were computers. Some of you are even old enough to remember the filing cabinets in which your parents kept health records, tax documents, and old family recipes. The first computer database was built in the 1960s, but the history of databases as we know them, really begins in 1970.

Dan Kelly

February 24, 2022

How can you get great performance out of your database when huge numbers of users are going to be submitting queries within the space of a few minutes or seconds?

Charlie Custer

February 18, 2022

It’s been three years since this blog was originally published and we’re still feeling great about our decision to prioritize PostgreSQL compatibility. Customers of ours often reference our PostgreSQL compatibility as a reason why the CockroachDB learning curve is so swift. Check out the latest documentation to see the full scope of our compatibility. And then take a look at the original reasons for the decision.

Cockroach Labs has been investing in early career recruiting since we first started the company. In 2016, only a year after the company’s inception, we brought on our first intern. Since then, we’ve steadily built a program driven by a passion for diversity and inclusion, creativity, and unique perspectives.

Thanks to services provided by AWS, GCP, and Azure it’s become relatively easy to develop applications that span multiple regions. This is great because slow apps kill businesses. There is one common problem with these applications: they are not supported by multi-region database architecture. CockroachDB is built to solve that problem and we’re doing it in production for many applications today. But that’s not what this blog is about. In this blog, I will provide a solution for the problem of getting Kubernetes pods to talk to each other in multi-region deployments.

The SQL standard defines four isolation levels (READ UNCOMMITTED, READ COMMITTED, REPEATABLE READ, and SERIALIZABLE). SNAPSHOT is a somewhat popular but non-standard addition to this list. People often reach for these words when they want to talk about behavior in CockroachDB in comparison to other databases, even when the behavior in question is not related to isolation.

Ben Darnell

February 11, 2022

Today I tried signing into MyChart because I got an email notification about a new statement (ugh). The log-in experience was so slow (seconds) that I immediately closed the window and went back to my daily life. I’ll probably never log in again. Point being, a bad user experience is sometimes the last user experience. For growth-focused companies the priority right out of the gates is user experience. They know it needs to be great or they won’t collect enough users and enough revenue (or VC money) to go and build out the feature rich application of their dreams. One obstacle that stands in the way of user experience is the speed of light. It’s too slow (hot take!). The human perceives anything under 100 milliseconds as “instant”. Anything over 200 milliseconds can feel kind of laggy (which leads to people like me never logging into their MyChart).

Dan Kelly

February 3, 2022

Mythical Games, currently valued at $1.25 billion, is one of the top 5 blockchain gaming startups. The four year-old company is part of a relatively niche industry with tremendous potential for growth – blockchain (or crypto) gaming presents opportunities for innovation in areas such as player ownership and player-led economies at scale. Today, the Mythical Platform is offered as-a-service to developers and publishers, allowing them to build or integrate blockchain-based play-to-earn economies into their games. This approach makes blockchain more accessible, and allows players to become stakeholders in their favorite games.

Cassie McAllister

January 28, 2022