Blog
Product
What is an inverted index, and why should you care?
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
Product
What is a data pipeline, and how do you build one?
A data pipeline is a piece of software that ingests data from one or more sources, and moves that data to one or more destinations. Often, the data is transformed as part of this process to ensure that it meets the requirements of the system or systems it is being sent to.
Charlie Custer
August 2, 2023
Community
Engineering
Product
How to solve the `abandoned cart problem` using row-level TTL
We’ve all done it. Imagine you’re browsing around the AllSaints online shop, dreaming about refreshing your fall wardrobe. You find a couple items and add them to your cart. You continue browsing but then, for some reason, you don’t check out. Instead, you close the browser tab and move on. In the e-commerce world, this is what’s known as shopping cart abandonment.
Aydrian Howard
July 26, 2023
Product
Multicloud vs. hybrid cloud vs. intercloud and more – what’s the difference and which is best?
By all accounts, multicloud is the future. And for lots of companies, multicloud is already the present. But multicloud is also a big buzzword. It’s not always clear what people even mean when they’re talking about, for example, multicloud deployments. In this article, we’ll take a look at what multicloud, hybrid cloud, and intercloud really mean. We’ll also introduce a new term, single-workload multicloud, to refer to a specific type of multicloud deployment. Finally, we’ll dig into some of the key factors to consider when trying to choose which of these deployment methods is best for you.
Charlie Custer
July 17, 2023
Product
How to manage CockroachDB as Code with Terraform
Managing all infrastructure as code is a way of ensuring that no configuration drift occurs and that performance is as expected. This is critical when you’re managing applications at scale where the impact of configuration drift is exponential. In this tutorial blog we’ll demonstrate how CockroachDB Dedicated (our DBaaS) can be managed as code via our integration with Terraform. With this integration you are able to integrate your database with the other elements of the software stack you are deploying. And then you can use pipeline tools to deploy your application as a complete stack including the database.
Mike Bookham
July 13, 2023
Product
Performance goals for mission-critical workloads
When it comes to choosing a database, deployment, and configuration for your most critical workloads, you’ve got plenty of options. But how can you strike the right balance between performance, resilience, and cost? Let’s take a closer look at the important factors to assess when making these decisions.
Charlie Custer
July 12, 2023
Product
Not if, but when: The case for mainframe modernization
The first idea for a mainframe was developed by a Harvard researcher who took the concept to IBM in the 1930s. After a decade or so of development, the 5 ton machine – that filled an entire room and would cost around $3M today to build – was ready to use in 1943. Industries such as banking, retail, insurance, utilities, healthcare, and government still rely on their mainframes to handle their most sensitive, large-scale transactional data. Mainframes excel when it comes to security and reliability which is why many organizations trust them with their mission-critical workloads.
Cassie McAllister
July 6, 2023
Product
What is cloud portability, and why should you care?
Companies move to the cloud to take advantage of a wide variety of benefits, but building your infrastructure on a public cloud also comes with risks. Chief among them is vendor lock-in and the fear of being at a single cloud provider’s mercy, locked in behind what would be the months or years of work necessary to switch to a different cloud. But operating across multiple clouds at the same time is technically difficult and often prohibitively expensive. Many companies have embraced a different way of mitigating the lock-in risk: cloud portability.
Charlie Custer
July 5, 2023
Product
What is a UUID, and what is it used for?
When working with a database, it’s common practice to use some kind of id field to provide a unique identifier for each row in a table. Imagine, for example, a customers table. We wouldn’t want to use fields such as name or address as unique identifiers because it’s possible more than one customer could have the same name, or share the same address, or in some cases even both! Instead, it’s a good idea to assign each row some kind of truly unique identifier. One option we have is to use a UUID.
Charlie Custer
June 29, 2023