Product

Full text indexing and search is such a common feature of applications these days. Users expect to be able to find a restaurant, a product, a movie review, or any number of other things quickly by entering a few search terms into a user interface. Many of these apps are built using a relational database as the data store, so the apps aren’t generally dedicated to search, but incorporate that as an added feature.

Michael Goddard

July 27, 2022

Back in April 2021, Cockroach Labs completed our first SOC 2 Type II audit. Now, thanks to collaboration between multiple teams led by the Compliance team, we have completed our second. As CockroachDB continues to evolve and add new products and features, we need to ensure that those new products and features meet various sets of security and compliance standards. This latest SOC 2 Type II audit covers a full 12 month review period for both of CockroachDB’s managed services offerings, CockroachDB Dedicated and CockroachDB Serverless. But before we get more in-depth on this new addition, let’s quickly recap what a SOC 2 Type II audit covers and why it’s important.

Star Wars and SQL began together. In 1977, the first (eventually fourth) Star Wars film debuted in theaters. In that same year an emerging English language-based structured query language for data, originally called SEQUEL, was renamed to SQL*. For the Rebellion, it was A New Hope to fight the Empire. For the rest of us, it was the birth of a nifty little world-changing technology known as the relational database.

Michelle Gienow

July 22, 2022

There are two different ways to use CockroachDB as a managed service and enjoy DBaaS benefits: CockroachDB Dedicated is a fully managed single-tenant service used by companies to store their data while adhering to their enterprise compliance requirements. CockroachDB Serverless offers automatically scalable service for building new and nimble applications while paying for only what you use.

Tomorrow, as you undoubtedly know, is day-one of an annual two-day retail event known as “Amazon Prime Day”. Two days of frenetic consumerism that stress Amazon’s architecture in much the same way that Black Friday and Cyber Monday stress the whole retail industry. In 2018 Amazon’s site served a 404 error for hours on Prime Day. But there’s no need to pick on Amazon…J. Crew, Macy’s, H&M, Lowes and others have all endured costly downtime during peak traffic. Three years of masks and stay-at-home mandates forced users to online shopping and forced retailers to scale their online operations to serve unprecedented customer volume. Some even had to establish their first-ever digital presence in order to survive widespread lockdowns that shuttered physical retailers. Survivability established, next came the need to meet equally unrelenting customer demands for fast and personalized user experiences across a vast spectrum of digital devices and platforms. Now elastic scalability, sophisticated personalization, and a seamless omnichannel experience are simply table stakes for modern retail organizations. That’s why choosing the right database infrastructure has become a business imperative. Not just to support surging high-transaction workloads, but also to ensure survival in the face of several dire trends facing retailers today.

Michelle Gienow

July 11, 2022

In simple terms, a relational (SQL) database stores structured data that conforms to a predefined schema. A document-model (or NoSQL) database stores documents that may contain unstructured data without a schema. At least, that’s the way that these two database storage models have traditionally been discussed.

Jim Walker

July 7, 2022

One of the most interesting questions we get to dig into in our annual Cloud Report is which CPUs offer the best performance – and more importantly, the best price for performance – for large OLTP workloads. To answer that question (among others) we test dozens of instance types across the three major public clouds – AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Charlie Custer

June 29, 2022

What is metadata, exactly? Metadata is data about other data. That’s a very broad definition, though. When you start trying to get specific, it can get murky pretty quickly. In our experience with our customers, we see “metadata” commonly used to describe two different sorts of use cases

Charlie Custer

June 24, 2022

We depend on financial companies and services to help us navigate just about everything — to the point where they’re basically a form of critical infrastructure, at least existentially speaking. (Try to imagine getting through the rest of your day right now if your credit card froze or your financial services were suddenly unavailable. Do you have enough cash on you to buy lunch, or a ticket/tank of gas to drive home?). In such a complex and far-reaching sector, there are many ways things can go wrong. And, unfortunately, as your platform/application/services grow, the number of possible stress points scales right along with them.

Michelle Gienow

June 23, 2022