Blog
Product
DBmarlin helps CockroachDB customers optimize performance
When the performance of your SQL database drops suddenly, do you know why? Tracking performance and linking cause to effect can be tricky with real-world database systems. DBAs, architects, and SREs are often working with multiple database systems, each with multiple databases in various states of development, testing, and production. These systems are often mixed between one or more cloud providers and self-hosted servers. On top of that, the performance of each database is influenced by auto-scaling, constantly-shifting workloads, engineering changes and updates, and more!
Russell Luke
July 6, 2021
Product
Don’t sell your soul to Amazon: Cloud applications and architectures for retail
If you’re a retail business, your current reality may best be described as “challenging” — even as a flood of pent up post-pandemic consumer spending is unleashed. Thanks to Amazon, customers expect abundant product availability, personalized recommendations, competitive pricing, and fast delivery. Mega retailers like Target and Walmart are fighting back by offering expanded online shopping, in-store shopping services with curbside pickup, and local delivery options — some even same-day.
Michelle Gienow
June 25, 2021
Product
How they survived a database outage: 3 companies share stories
Imagine this: you work in system architecture for a multibillion-dollar consumer-facing business, and it’s the middle of a busy weekend. Suddenly, your database goes down. Transactions aren’t processing. Customers are angry. Logistical issues are stacking up because inventory and warehouse tracking are down. Customer service reps are swamped, but half of the technical staff are twiddling their thumbs because they can’t do their work without a functional database.
Charlie Custer
June 3, 2021
Product
SIGMOD 2022: Enabling the next generation of multi-region applications with CockroachDB
We are pleased to announce that our second paper, Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB, will appear in the Industry Track of the ACM SIGMOD 2022 conference in Philadelphia, PA (as well as remotely), on June 12-17. This paper is the sequel to our SIGMOD 2020 paper in which we introduced CockroachDB’s geo-distributed capabilities to the world.
Alexander Shraer
May 31, 2021
Product
Control data latency and availability with a few SQL statements
Slow applications kill business. Greg Lindon (in this now archived deck), noted that 100ms in latency lowered Amazon’s sales by 1%. Marissa Mayer pointed out that speed really matters when she explained the results of A/B tests as “500ms of additional load time dropped Google searches by 20%.”
Andy Woods
May 20, 2021
Product
Building better IAM with a scale-out, OLTP database
The identity and access management platforms that I either used or researched in the past always left much to be desired. Most times their audit trails aren’t strong enough. Pricing per user or per session is too expensive. They don’t deploy easily in multiple regions. And they aren’t exactly easy to operate or scale across clouds. There was clearly a gap in the market for a modern IAM platform. I needed such a platform in order to properly do my previous job as a Head of eGovernment and IAM (in Switzerland). But such a platform didn’t exist! This is when we began thinking through and building the platform that has become ZITADEL today. Jump straight to the architecture.
Florian Forster
May 13, 2021
Product
How to model JSON data in a Go app with CockroachDB
*Guest post alert! Jack is a core maintainer of pgx, a PostgreSQL driver and toolkit for Go. He helped build the testing integration for CockroachDB and pgx. Jack blogs at https://www.jackchristensen.com/* -– Many applications benefit from representing some data in a relational structure and some data in a more flexible document structure like JSON. Taking advantage of the JSON functionality available in a relational database can reduce the need for a dedicated object database, minimize infrastructure and application complexity, and improve performance.
Jack Christensen
May 4, 2021
Product
Distributed spatial data in free, open source CockroachDB
CockroachDB is a reliable, relational database, built to help you scale your transactional workloads in the cloud. Our focus on common relational data types has brought bulletproof resilience and effortless scalability to all sorts of customer applications, from customer service applications to global data stores for cloud-connected devices, to streaming video providers. Today, we’re excited to bring that same bulletproof resilience and effortless scale to new use cases: spatial data types in CockroachDB. The same open-source database you use to store and access common relational data types (e.g., INT, TEXT, UUID) can now be used with GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY spatial data types. And best of all, it’s free.
Andy Woods
April 30, 2021
Product
How banks and fintech apps innovate (and compete) around cloud-native
Modern fintech apps like Betterment and Robinhood push the limits of what consumers expect from banking apps. One of their biggest competitive advantages is that they can support real-time decision-making and transaction processing, providing users with instant decisions, personalized experiences, and feature-rich applications. To keep up, banks and financial services organizations need to embrace digital transformations that enable them to innovate around transaction services. These services can include dynamic pricing, hyper-personalized content, real-time business process optimization, and fraud detection.
Jessica Edwards
April 28, 2021