Product

When building a multi-region application, one of the first things to consider is how and where data will be placed. For example, when building a gambling application deployed across the country, you want to make sure users have quick access to their data no matter their location. Gamblers and the platforms they use both need low latency access to real-time data. It can make or break the user experience. This is an easy example because money is won and lost, but the requirement for applications to deliver low latency experiences to a global user base is obviously applicable to every other industry as well.

Would you fly in an aircraft that wasn’t tested? Get behind the wheel of a car whose model hadn’t been crash-tested? What about using a distributed database for storing your mission critical data that hadn’t been tested and gone through quality assurance? I’d happily wager that if you are a database developer, then anyone that makes use of your database - whether that be directly (developer or database administrator), or indirectly (you, as the end-user of a product that most likely makes use of a database) - is going to feel a whole lot better when you tell them that you test the database. Testing is a fundamental and well accepted part of building functional software.

CockroachDB is an excellent system of record, but no technology exists in a vacuum. Some of our users would like to keep their data mirrored in full-text indexes to power natural language search. Others want to use analytics engines and big data pipelines to run huge queries without impacting production traffic. Still others want to send mobile push notifications in response to data changes without doing the bookkeeping themselves.

My current employer uses sharded and replicated Postgres via RDS. Even basic things like deploying schema changes to every shard are an unbelievable pain in the ass, and changing the number of shards on a major database is a high-touch, multi-day operation. After having worked with Spanner in the past, it’s like going back to the stone age, like we’re only a step above babysitting individual machines in a closet. Nobody should do this. — HackerNews user GeneralMayhem

Michelle Gienow

April 12, 2023

So you need to scale. That’s a good problem to have! But should you scale up or scale out? There’s no easy answer, so let’s take a closer look at horizontal scaling vs. vertical scaling , how they compare, and what the pros and cons are for each approach.

Charlie Custer

April 10, 2023

In this post you’ll learn about the CockroachDB Cloud API and how I’ve used it to create an application Dashboard with Next.js. Using the API you can build a custom interface to meet your organization’s needs, or perform various tasks relating to your database infrastructure. I’ll also explain how I’ve used NextAuth.js to create conditional authorization rules to facilitate greater control over the functionality. You can get a feel for what I’ve built using the links below. 🚀 Preview: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/demos/demo-cloud-api/ ⚙️ GitHub: https://github.com/cockroachdb/demo-cloud-api/

Paul Scanlon

April 5, 2023

November 25, 2020. If you work in tech infrastructure, that’s a date you probably remember. On that day, AWS’s US-east-1 experienced a significant outage, and it broke a pretty significant percentage of the internet. Adobe, League of Legends, Roku, Sirius XM, Amazon, Flickr, Giphy, and many, many more experienced issues or went offline completely as a result of the outage.

Charlie Custer

March 14, 2023

Upgrading and modernizing your database can sound like an expensive proposition. But it doesn’t have to be. One major electronics company found that shifting from MySQL to CockroachDB saved them $700,000 in their first year, earning them a 149% ROI.

Charlie Custer

March 2, 2023

Learn how Paul created an open source JavaScript utility package to help convert cloud provider region codes into real locations and country flags.

Paul Scanlon

February 17, 2023