Product

Everyone here at Cockroach Labs is thrilled about the publication of our very own O’Reilly tome, CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide. Seriously delighted — as in, just-found-out-the-rest-of-today’s-meetings-are-all-canceled level of happiness. We are beyond proud to have our own hefty tech book with an iconic animal on the cover. (Or, even better, iconic insect on the cover since the fine folks at O’Reilly Media agreed to let us have a cockroach on ours). Most of all, we are delighted to have the complete workings of CockroachDB collected in a single, thorough and hands-on resource to help make distributed SQL accessible to even more users. This is thanks in large part due to Guy Harrison, who is quite literally The Guy Who Wrote The Book On CockroachDB. Guy co-authored the Definitive Guide with Cockroach Labs co-founder and chief architect, Ben Darnell, and our head of education, Jesse Seldess. “Guy’s deep existing database knowledge paired with his diligence in learning Cockroach just as deeply contributed immeasurably to the scope and thoroughness of the book,” Ben commented.

Michelle Gienow

May 10, 2022

When you’re standing up a quick prototype of a web application, you probably don’t think much about how your database will scale. But in the long run, scale matters. And while scaling and deploying a highly available relational database used to be both expensive and challenging, today it’s pretty straightforward and completely free. There’s really no reason not to start with a database that’ll scale automatically.

Charlie Custer

May 9, 2022

CockroachDB helps small to large organizations manage their transactional data at global scale, with high-availability, while providing multi-cloud & hybrid disaster proofing capabilities. Many of those customers trust CockroachDB to store PII or organizationally sensitive data, and they secure it with native data security capabilities in the product. But there are some needs that require reimagination of how one looks at data security at different kinds of scale - across different business units or teams, across multiple CockroachDB clusters, or across multiple types of data stores including OLTP and OLAP.

If you use a database, at some point you’ll need to modify your schema design. Maybe you need to store new kinds of information. Perhaps you’ll add a field to a table or even need to change a primary key. Regardless of the reason, application requirements tend to change over time - and you’ll need to migrate. We know how important schema modification is, which is why we’ve built zero-downtime online schema changes and online primary key changes into CockroachDB.

Imagine walking into this: “About 4 million lines of PHP code, written by underpaid, sometimes not well meaning, freelancers and students over the span of 8 years. The CEO wrote a large part, but stopped learning new techniques around 2004.” That’s how bad tech debt can get when a startup is run without considering that all of those messy shortcuts will eventually have to get cleaned up.

Charlie Custer

March 22, 2022

When you’ve got a great idea for a startup, application architecture is probably one of the last things on your mind. But architecting your app right the first time can save you major headaches further down the road. So let’s take a look at a typical startup application architecture, with a particular focus on the database and how the choices that application architects make in that part of their stack can impact scale, user experience, and more.

Charlie Custer

March 16, 2022

Imagine you’re driving a rental car in Rome and the satnav (or GPS) on your phone stops working. This happened to me two years ago when I was commuting by car each day from an Airbnb in Trastevere to an office on Via Amsterdam.

Michael Goddard

March 9, 2022

Do you love thinking about servers? Most developers don’t. That’s why serverless platforms such as AWS Lambda, which lets you run functions in the cloud without having to think about servers, have become so popular. Running your code in the cloud doesn’t truly free you from thinking about servers unless you’re also using a serverless database, though. Amazon itself offers a serverless database called Amazon Aurora Serverless, but what if you prefer the advantages that CockroachDB offers, or simply want to avoid vendor lock-in with your database in case you choose to migrate to a different cloud in the future?

Charlie Custer

March 8, 2022

“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