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Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there has been a massive traffic spike in everything digital--from online shopping to remote learning. Under the hood, companies responsible for these technologies have had to quickly adapt to handle the growth in users. Having an elastically scalable and cloud-native stack--all the way down to the database--has helped ease this transition. One such company that experienced a pandemic-driven surge in popularity was UNIwise, an education tech company based in Denmark that sells an online test platform called WISEflow.

Dan Kelly

February 19, 2021

CockroachDB empowers developers to build fast, scalable applications, and one of the ways it does this is by providing rich, Postgres-compatible SQL. And while CockroachDB follows the Postgres wire protocol, the database also has a custom SQL implementation designed for a distributed database. Over the years, we’ve expanded our distributed SQL implementation to include a cost-based optimizer (CBO) and vectorized execution engine - all built to tackle the complexity of distributed data for developers. In CockroachDB 20.2, we’re excited to provide developers with an increasingly rich SQL feature set that includes support for spatial data, materialized views, Enums, ALTER TABLE, and user-defined schema changes. Let’s dive into the new capabilities.

CockroachDB is designed to deliver bulletproof resilience. But even the world’s safest boat needs to carry life jackets. The same principle applies to your data, which is why we’ve baked a breadth of Backup and Restore capabilities into CockroachDB.

As long as you’re willing to follow the rules, deploying on Kubernetes and air travel can be quite pleasant. More often than not, things will “just work”. However, if one is interested in traveling with an alligator that must remain alive or scaling a database that must remain available, the situation is likely to become a bit more complicated. It may even be easier to build one’s own plane or database for that matter. Traveling with reptiles aside, scaling a highly available stateful system is no trivial task.

A global financial data firm migrated off its legacy Oracle infrastructure, creating a single hybrid, geo-partitioned deployment of CockroachDB. Frustrated by its legacy Oracle database architecture, a major American financial data firm wanted to consolidate its legacy databases and migrate to public cloud infrastructure.

Jessica Edwards

February 8, 2021

What you build and how you build it should not be dictated by your database. The tools and frameworks that you’re familiar with should be compatible with your database of choice. This is why modern database solutions have implemented support for third part tools like Pony ORM, Hibernate, GORM, jOOQ and others. Developers are beginning to expect to be able to bend the database to their will. And they should - because the flexibility leads to better applications.

When you’re working with distributed systems, data storage and retrieval aren’t as straightforward as they are in legacy monolithic databases. This comes with advantages like resilience and high availability, but it means that performance monitoring of a given transaction can be challenging. Query execution is often an extremely complex web of interactions. Following and analyzing performance bottlenecks in this environment can be difficult and sometimes frustrating to get to the root cause. For this reason we added distributed tracing to our UI and made an accompanying tutorial below.

Companies like Cockroach Labs are first and foremost groups of people; people with passions and drives that go beyond what they do for work. This is, by and large, what drives organizations to consider how to best enable their staff to make an impact on their communities through volunteerism, donations, and action. As a company, we have emphasized doing good in our corporate giving initiatives: we match referral bonuses with an equivalent donation to a 501(c)(3) charity of our staff’s choice, run marketing campaigns geared towards amassing donations to groups such as Women Who Code and Black Girls Code, and establish an employee-led committee each year to decide where to donate a significant corporate gift. Still, many of our people have other ways of giving back. To give Roachers the time and space they need to be forces of good, we’ve established Connect and Contribute Days: company time dedicated for our people to learn, seek understanding, grow, volunteer, mobilize, or otherwise make a positive change.

Whether you’re a developer or operator, we want to give you the observability tools you need to monitor your CockroachDB cluster. This includes standard tools such as logs, metrics like Prometheus and health endpoints, and alerting. But modern observability requires more than just the standard tools.

Andy Woods

January 26, 2021