Product

When people talk about multi-region architecture, it’s often in the context of operational resilience. And that’s certainly a valid use case in a world where cloud region failures aren’t uncommon. But resilience is not the only reason to consider multi-region architecture. Fast-growing companies should also consider the virtues of multi-cloud deployments for market expansion.

Charlie Custer

October 5, 2023

Each October, RoachFest gathers together application owners, architects, engineers, and operators running their data-intensive workloads on CockroachDB (along with other innovators who are exploring doing the same). This conference centers on our users: attendees share their work, meet their peers, and learn first-hand from the builders behind the database. They’re also the first to hear about our latest product and feature releases, and the new capabilities they unlock for users.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how to safely add and drop columns from a SQL database using ALTER TABLE … ADD and ALTER TABLE … DROP COLUMN. We will also briefly touch on adding and dropping constraints on SQL tables, since that functions in the same way and since it’s important to consider constraints anyway when you’re adding columns to a table.

Charlie Custer

October 2, 2023

Most SQL content on the web seems to be written with data analysts in mind. And that’s fine, but developers need SQL too! Your application is only as available and performant as your database, and solid database performance doesn’t just mean knowing how to INNER JOIN or SELECT *, it also means understanding monitoring and ops commands, using EXPLAIN ANALYZE, etc.

Charlie Custer

September 21, 2023

Reliability is your most important feature. It’s easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of planning, building, and shipping new product features. But at the end of the day, if your application isn’t available (or customers are turned away by a sluggish experience), none of those features matter.

Charlie Custer

September 7, 2023

When it comes to payment and billing applications, not only is availability crucial, but development teams need to build idempotency into their system to guarantee data correctness.

Cassie McAllister

August 30, 2023

Major cloud platform outages used to be rare events. As the amount of global data increases exponentially, however (90% of the world’s data was generated in the last two years alone!) significant outages are becoming increasingly common. The potential user impact of cloud service provider (CSP) outages hits both deep and wide. For example, GCP’s europe-west9 full-region outage in April 2023 and AWS’s us-east-1 outage in June 2023 each temporarily disrupted operations for the businesses, schools, hospitals, and even government agencies relying on their services in those regions. And these are but two among many recent CSP downtime events: Data shows a steady rise in total observed global network outages in 2023 so far. The growing frequency of outages like these keeps the world’s government officials up at night. One of their deepest concerns is for the potentially catastrophic impact a major CSP failure could have on financial institutions — and the very real-world damage this could do to their economies. Concern is increasingly turning to action as different countries propose technical requirements aimed at ensuring operational resilience for their financial institutions (as well as other critical services like utilities, transportation, and healthcare). Technical requirements that are already becoming formal government regulations in some countries, with many more on the horizon. What does this mean for all organizations right now, and what can they do to prepare?

Michelle Gienow

August 24, 2023

[This post was originally published in October 2022. It has been updated to reflect current product offerings.] Traditionally, one of the stickiest decisions developers need to make when creating a database is choosing how many servers to use based on expected application traffic. Guess too low and your db could fall over under load, causing an outage. Guess too high, you pay for servers that just sit idle most of the time. Spiky loads? Uh oh, gotta overprovision to make sure those surges get handled even if it means wasted capacity 90%+ of the time.

Michelle Gienow

August 18, 2023

Indexes can have a significant impact on database performance. Let’s take a look at one type that’s especially important for searching text: the inverted index.

Charlie Custer

August 17, 2023