Cockroach Labs Blog

Netflix and other innovators are headlining RoachFest 2024, the event series from distributed SQL database CockroachDB. Attend in Menlo Park, London and NYC.

What are the signs that PostgreSQL may no longer be suited for your banking and payments applications and business needs?

Learn how to modernize your database and migrate from Oracle to CockroachDB with this step-by-step guide.

Inside the architecture Starburst built to support exabytes of data across a five-region deployment with CockroachDB that guarantees high availability and low latency access for its customers.

Engineers just want to enjoy their weekend. But outages, hardware failures, and usage spikes can all lead to the dreaded PagerDuty alert, especially when the system being affected is something as critical as your metadata database.

CockroachDB joins the Google Distributed Cloud, an air gapped solution built to serve public sector institutions and highly-regulated enterprises in industries like banking, healthcare, and manufacturing.

This blog explores how to leverage CockroachDB as an OLTP database and BigQuery for OLAP, and then further enhance data capabilities using BigQueryML and Vertex AI for machine learning.

Under READ COMMITTED isolation, PostgreSQL can sometimes miss rows when performing UPDATE, DELETE, SELECT FOR UPDATE, or SELECT FOR SHARE statements. This is due to the EvalPlanQual recheck PostgreSQL adds to these statements to prevent lost-update anomalies.

The Nightfall team runs two major use cases in production on CockroachDB: a metadata storage layer for their API gateway and an interactive analytics dashboard. Read on to learn more.

User data. Application data. Customer history. User account data. Behavioral data. Metadata is at the very heart of your business, and when you do metadata right, people won’t notice you’ve done anything at all.

With the help of Antithesis, a startup from the founders of FoundationDB, CockroachDB engineers were able to track down and reproduce a most elusive one-in-a-million bug, nearly deterministically!

How do you keep databases available and performant at million-QPS scale? Here's how DoorDash does it with CockroachDB, including three tips for success at scale.

You find a mystery server under a desk. It has been sitting there, unpatched, unattended, but running — for the past twenty years. Nobody has the slightest idea of why it's there or what it's doing.

What are the benefits of running a database across multiple clouds, and more importantly: how can we actually accomplish it?

Learn how this sports betting company built a performant, consistent, and compliant mobile app that scales easily to new regions — and saved millions in projected overhead.

Every relational database needs to establish a balance between accuracy and performance. Transaction isolation levels have a direct, though often unrecognized, impact on both.

Learn the difference between an inner join, a left join, a right join, and more. Plus, learn about some special join types in SQL, like self join and cross join.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of managed database-as-a-service offerings, and why should you consider letting someone else operate your database?

Forget the anomaly table. Here's what the different transaction isolation levels mean for the design and implementation of *your* app.

Applications built on a traditional failover pattern with two data centers (and no access to a third on-prem or cloud region) used to face challenges in ensuring high resilience with CRDB. New in v23.2, physical cluster replication functionality now allows limited distribution applications to survive full cluster failures — with RPO and RTO measured in seconds rather than minutes.

How do we know what our database is actually capable of? We test it. A lot. Here's a summary of some of the tests and benchmarks we run regularly to ensure CockroachDB is performant even at global scale.

Inventory management is challenging. Here's a look at how to build modern inventory architecture based on real-world systems built by massive ecommerce companies.

Database migrations are famously difficult. They only happen when the current database is seriously holding back a business, typically in one of three ways. If this is you, CockroachDB's MOLT suite of migration tools is designed to make your database transition as boring as possible.

Cloud storage with enterprise-grade availability, durability, and performance – all for less than what the major CSPs charge? It's possible. Here's how.

CockroachDB v23.2 now seamlessly integrates with Confluent, using change data capture so users can connect the CRDB's distributed SQL capabilities with the real-time event streaming features of Confluent.

CockroachDB 23.2 includes stored procedures/UDFs, performance boosts with smarter data distribution, physical replication, expedited recovery from cloud failures, and Read Committed isolation.

To get you off to a strong start in 2024, here are our top ten most valuable “a-ha” moments and technical takeaways from the past year of Cockroach Labs' Big Ideas in App Architecture podcast.

What is cloud SQL? For that matter, what is Cloud SQL, and is it different from cloud SQL? Let's get to the bottom of this important but somewhat confusing (thanks, Google!) term.

Let's take a look at the most commonly-used data types in Postgres and how they're used in practice, including examples.

It's amazing how a series of small but unfortunate events can quickly add up to one very expensive problem. Like the time one person fat-fingered the wrong year on a mainframe JCL job, Ronald Reagan died, and the US postal service lost $500 million.

How do you build an application that’s scalable, correct, and fast all at the same time? The folks at Materialize know.

Let's take a look at RPO (Recovery Point Objective), RTO (Recovery Time Objective), and learn how to build fault-tolerant applications in which data is never lost.

At RoachFest '23, Shopmonkey Chief Technical Officer Jeff Haynie spoke about the compelling reasons the company moved their core business from Mongo to CockroachDB, and the architectural innovations they implemented to take advantage of CockroachDB’s unique multi-region capabilities.

Each year, the Cockroach Labs blog offers a smorgasbord of posts on technical, educational, informational, and cultural topics to our fellow distributed database devotees (and everyone else, too!). In case you missed them. here are some reader favorites from 2023.

CRDB is shorthand for CockroachDB: the scalable, consistently-replicated, distributed SQL database. A single instance of CRDB can scale from a one laptop to thousands of servers distributed all around the world.

The question comes at you in the hallways, the cafeteria, even the restroom: "Hey, when are WE getting AI???"? It's all anyone wants to talk to you about these days. Here is a handy four-step plan for evaluating and adopting AI so you can satisfy your curious co-workers, instead of simply screaming (on the inside, hopefully).

The crew of the Enterprise was teaching us some important lessons about databases in modern app development, although they didn't realize it.

Modernizing the data layer in your stack can be hugely beneficial, but it can also be risky. Here are three lessons Spreedly learned in their modernization efforts.

Tweeq's cloud-agnostic "no-brainer" tech stack — Go, CockroachDB, Temporal, Bazel, and gRPC, deployed on Oracle Cloud — let them build a payments platform that is scalable to millions of users, available 24/7, extensible, and easy to change.

At RoachFest23, platform engineers Rogger Fabbri and Mario Morgado documented Form3's migration from PostgreSQL and demonstrated the platform's multi-cloud architecture, using CRDB and Kubernetes to span AWS, GCP and Azure with active-active replication to survive any event — even a full cloud outage.

There’s a lot of hype around multi-cloud, but that doesn’t mean adopting a multi-cloud architecture is right for everyone. So what are the "right" reasons to adopt it?

Traditionally, updating your SQL database schema once the database is in production has been a pain. But it doesn't have to be. There's a better way!

True story: It's October, 2012. A company decommissions its DR facility. Days later, Superstorm Sandy hits. You won't believe what happens next!

Running a legacy RDBMS on-prem but dreaming of multi-cloud distributed SQL? It can become reality – but only if you approach the project in the right way.

Aurora Postgres makes scaling reads easy, but writes are limited to a single node, and that limitation took DoorDash's entire application offline for hours.

Learn why Netflix adopted CockroachDB as a scalable SQL database and how they’re using CockroachDB today.

Architects from Hard Rock Digital shares their journey building a sportsbetting and iCasino that can quickly enter new markets with CockroachDB and AWS Outposts.

Black Friday can be a dream for CEOs, but a nightmare for CTOs. Here’s how to build a backend inventory system that’s up to the challenge.

At RoachFest23, Fortinet Director of Software Development Louis Jia shared the story of FortiSASE’s migration from CockroachDB SH (self-hosted) to CockroachDB managed services.

Multi-cloud is not easy. Dig into our free report on the current state of multi-cloud, which contains expert advice from on-the-ground experts on pitfalls to avoid, best practices, and more.

We just released our Browser SQL Shell, which allows writing queries on CockroachDB within seconds of cluster creation.

Schema change happens — a lot. Most relational database systems require taking the DB offline to update your schema. CockroachDB, however, allows online schema changes with no disruption to your application. Here's how it works.

Here's how City Storage Systems built a highly available, highly performant persistence layer that works for mission-critical workloads at global scale WITHOUT needing a massive team.

CockroachDB nodes can be distributed across multiple locations across the globe to ensure that the data can survive outages. Learn about node locality, why this is important in CockroachDB, and how to set this in Kubernetes environments.

Here's how companies using Azure can allow access to CockroachDB for all approved users by dynamically mapping users in Azure Active Directory to a matching SQL user created in CockroachDB.

A serverless database is any database that embodies the core principles of the serverless computing paradigm. This blog details what that means for developers.

The root cause of many outages is human error. At RoachFest23, Thomas Boltze (Head of Cloud and Engineering Excellence with Santander) shared the core tenets of building operationally resilient systems and how to practice them in the real world — fallible humans and all.

The Halloween Problem is a rare but scary issue that can haunt relational databases, mutating your data in unexpected ways if you're not careful.

Learn how to optimize your relational database for better performance, including tuning queries, adding indexes, adjusting your schema, and more!

In this article, we share some key considerations for a technology leader involved in an M&A process and discuss the benefits of choosing flexible, cloud-agnostic technologies.

RoachFest '23, the annual user conference for CockroachDB customers, featured thirty speakers from some of the world’s leading enterprise companies describing the problems they solve, and the innovation they unlock, by using CockroachDB

Learn what kinds of problems often cause high CPU issues in Postgres, and how you can resolve them to improve database and application performance.

When critical tier 0 applications experience disruption or downtime, the outage can result in more than financial losses. Longterm damage to a company's reputation is also a significant risk. Multi-region application architecture mitigates these risks by ensuring high availability.

The cloud is, by definition, a distributed environment. But many traditional databases were created decades ago, in the age of monoliths, and now struggle to provide high availability, horizontal scalability, and performance under modern distributed workloads. So what exactly is a distributed database, and how does it work?

Operational resilience isn't the only good reason to consider multi-region deployments. For growing companies, they can make expanding into new markets faster and more cost-effective, too.

CockroachDB dedicated is on Azure, and multi-region CockroachDB serverless is in general availability, and MOLT Live Migration Service is released in preview on stage at RoachFest '23.

Understanding the Raft Consensus Algorithm can be tough. In honor of "Mean Girls" day (October 3), we present Raft as explained through the movie "Mean Girls."

Learn to add and drop columns and their constraints safely -- without losing any data you don't want to lose -- in relational SQL databases.

Crain’s has ranked Cockroach Labs #1 in its 2023 Best Places to Work in New York City list. This is the fourth year in a row Cockroach Labs has received this ranking in the large category.

sqlfmt is an opinionated SQL formatter for writing prettier SQL. Developers should use it and stop thinking about how to format SQL.

The first question many developers ask us is why we chose to write a distributed SQL database in Go, a garbage-collected language.

In this post, we’ll share a few powerful optimizations that mitigate many of the performance problems common to Go garbage collection.

Business continuity and operational resilience are not the same thing. Here's why enterprise organizations need both to survive and succeed.

Mercedes-Benz, Ericsson, Cockroach Labs will speak at KubeCrash, a virtual Kubernetes conference on October 18, 2023.

Never forget a SQL command again with this easy-reference cheat sheet that covers everything from the basics of creating a table to ops and administration, query performance, and more!

Video platform Mux built a signing keys system on CockroachDB and Kubernetes, and deploys it across AWS and GCP.

A distributed SQL database scales easily, is strongly consistent, is resilient, geo-replicates data, speaks SQL, offers data locality, and is cloud neutral.

To ensure fault tolerance and achieve cloud portability, run your applications across multiple clouds. Here's how three fintech companies made that happen.

Features don't matter if your application isn’t _available_ (or customers are turned away by a sluggish experience). So how do you make sure your application and database stay online and performant?

Learn why Booksy built their global order management system on top of CockroachDB and GCP.

When it comes to payment and billing applications, engineering teams need to build idempotency into their system to guarantee data correctness and avoid duplicate payments, incorrect balances, etc.

The time is coming (maybe sooner than we think) when regulators will require a standardized approach to operational resilience in the name of public good.

CockroachDB Serverless offers a free tier to make sure every developer always has the right capacity and 99.99% uptime — and never overspends to get them.

Indexes can have a significant impact on database performance. Let’s take a look at inverted indexes, what they're for, and how to use them.

The dating industry is built on delivering a great customer experience. Not only do you need your users to like the functionality of your platform, but they also put a lot of trust into your organization to help them find a match. Learn how Doubble builds to meet expectations.

Learn how to turn a single-region application into a multi-region for performance, resilience and compliance.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a streaming service, a sports betting app, or a social media platform – major sports drama is GOLD. At least as long as you can survive it.

Distributed database performance — both latency and uptime — can be dramatically improved with CDN-like multi-region deployments.

Avoid common pitfalls and get your new database completely serving production data on a reliable timeline by asking these five questions.

Data pipelines help move your data from one place (or more) to another. But why is that important, and how do you actually go about building and implementing one?

6 lessons that companies of any size can take away from the TayTay-Ticketmaster meltdown.

All e-commerce sites suffer from some amount of cart abandonment. This blog is about using row-level TTL in CockroachDB to add single SQL statement that solves the problem.

Cockroach labs has been named a Customers’ Choice vendor in the 2023 Gartner® Peer Insights™ ‘Voice of the Customer' report. 98% of customers are willing to recommend CockroachDB, and we received an overall rating of 4.7 out of 5.0.

Relational database developers have long used the term “Entity” when designing database schemas. Meanwhile, on the software architecture side, the term “Entity” is a key component of domain-driven design. So what is the difference?

We are thrilled to announce that CockroachDB dedicated, the fully managed single-tenant version of CockroachDB, is now HIPAA-ready and can be used to safely store protected health information (PHI).

Multicloud is the future. But it's also a big buzzword. What do people actually mean when they say that, and how can you determine if multicloud is right for your use case?

Managing everything 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.

Handling a payments system can get complex in a hurry as your company scales up. But the right tools and architecture can do a lot of that hard work for you.

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 unpack some of the architectural differences between PostgreSQL and CockroachDB to understand the challenges of the single server, single instance architecture.

Idempotency is a property of an operation that allows it to be applied multiple times without changing the result. You need it for event-driven systems.

In this blog post, we explore some of the intricacies of time in PostgreSQL and decipher the distinctions between Time, TIMETZ, Timestamp, and TimestampTZ in PostgreSQL

In this blog, you'll learn a few reasons why CockroachDB customers believe leaving your mainframe behind for a distributed SQL solution is the right decision.

Cloud portability is a popular buzzword in tech circles, but what is it? Does it really matter? And how can you actually achieve it?

Cockroach Labs officially expanded into India, marking a significant milestone in their global growth strategy. The move to India reflects their continued recognition of global talent and the country's immense strategic potential to position the distributed SQL database to be used across the world.

How to build an architecture that ensures your metadata is highly available, consistent, and disaster-proof.

You need to identify your database rows somehow. Calling them row 1, row 2, etc. comes with some hidden hazards. There's a better way: UUIDs.

Learn how to use ADD CONSTRAINT to manage primary keys, foreign keys, and other constraints in SQL databases.

Foreign key constraints are important to any SQL database, but they can also cause problems if they're not implemented correctly.

NOT NULL constraints are a ubiquitous tool for upholding data integrity. However, their performance benefits are less obvious. In this post we'll examine a few of these optimizations that transform query plans involving foreign key relationships.

Learn how Netflix moves and processes operational data from CockroachDB and other data stores.

Migrate, move, and archive data with CockroachDB CREATE CHANGEFEED statement. Simply create a new changefeed to stream row-level changes in a configurable format to a configurable sink like Kafka or Google Cloud Pub/Sub.

Intelligent Insights is a tool that exposes problems detected in workloads and schemas, then offers recommendations to improve the performance of the workload.

The mission of Roacher Pride is to highlight and embrace Roacher diversity and enable us to celebrate Pride every day, while educating all Roachers on LGBTQIA+ history and how to be the best ally at work and in the larger community.

Switching from Oracle can seem painful, but it is possible. This is the story of a company that did it.

This blog post explains why we built forward indexes, the main challenges that came up with the implementation, and some demonstrations of the staggering results.

A look at synchronous replication, asynchronous replication, and how data can slip through the cracks and get lost with these very common approaches to data replication/backup.

The fintech industry is extremely competitive and it's no longer acceptable to make tradeoffs when building your infrastructure.

In a distributed database, a hotspot is an overworked node. But how can you identify them fast enough to prevent damage, or avoid them entirely?

Learn to use the Calico clustermesh and CockroachDB to enable inter-cluster pod communication, achieve scalability, and implement granular security controls to solve the challenges of a multi-cluster network architecture.

Level up your changefeeds and simplify your ETL process by doing transformations right in the database.

In CockroachDB v23.1, we are introducing a new feature which enables external SQL query editors to provide contextual suggestions on SQL syntax to developers.

Learn about Bubbles, Sparkles, and the CLI improvements that were released with CockroachDB 23.1.

Netflix runs CockroachDB as part of their persistence-as-a-service offering to improve the developer’s experience and increase productivity.

You might be able to speed up your application by executing some functions in the database. Here's why and how you might want to do that.

In this post Rob and Paul explain how they built Silo, a fully functioning multi-region Next.js application combining CockroachDB multi-region serverless and a multi-region Node.js (Lambda) API backed by a Geographically aware Route 53 Hosted Zone

CockroachDB dedicated is now on Microsoft Azure. Distribute data across multiple cloud regions with CockroachDB serverless. Distributed UDFs, full-text search, autocomplete, and more.

The technical definition of downtime is “a period of time when technology services are unavailable to users”. Accurate, but completely misses both the serious business impacts and the deeply human pain that can result whenever downtime — whether planned or unplanned — disrupts work.

Cockroach Labs listed on Inc.'s Best Places to Work List for the third year in a row.

In this blog post, we'll go over a few designs for a REGIONAL BY ROW table, and we'll use the example of a gambling application to motivate why different designs might be appropriate in different situations.

Upserts in SQL are common (and very useful!) but actually doing them can get a little complicated depending on the database you're using.

Learn what foreign keys are, how they work, and why they're critical for building high-performance SQL databases.

Disasters are expensive. Downtime (and the thought of downtime) are among the endless reasons a Software Engineer may struggle to switch off. This blog is about preventing those disasters from ever occurring.

Bolting resilience and scalability onto legacy RDMBS adds complexity and, by extension, risk. A modern data architecture can use distributed SQL to get those same advantages without the downsides. Here's how.

Learn how engineers at CockroachDB test the database and catch more obscure bugs with Metamorphic testing.

Learn about the four key architectural differences between Google Cloud Spanner and CockroachDB. Both are distributed SQL, general-purpose databases built for the cloud.

CockroachDB is an excellent system of record, but no technology exists in a vacuum. That's why we built our version of change data capture, which we call the changefeed.

In some multi-region architectures, if the primary region goes down, you'll see 10-15 minutes of RTO & 5 minutes of RPO. That's not good enough!

Learn how to design a great database schema (and why you might want a schema when there are "schema-less" database options).

Your business faces costs and risks when technology can’t evolve fast enough to meet changing business needs.

Learn the difference between horizontal scaling ("scaling out") and vertical scaling ("scaling up"), and which approach is most appropriate for your use case.

Multi-cloud deployment can minimize latency and increase availability. Here's why more companies are going multi-cloud, and how to deploy your own multi-cloud database.

Learn about the various ways you can use the new CockroachDB Cloud API, including an example that gives you insight into your database costs.

How do you calculate the total cost of a cloud database? In this blog, we’ll provide a framework to think about the costs incurred when buying a database.

In this article, you'll how schema changes happen with a variety of database technologies to demonstrate the importance of performing schema changes without downtime.

The total cost of database ownership can be broken down essentially into the license cost, the storage cost, and the compute cost. The focus of this blog is the reduction of storage costs.

Sometimes, reading stale data is ok — preferred, even. Let's look at "follower reads" (aka "stale reads"), a technique for getting good performance from a database accessed from multiple geographic regions.

How have databases evolved to handle high availability demands? This post walks through the development of active-passive, active-active, and multi-active systems.

Jason Forget joins as new President and Chief Revenue Officer to help accelerate growth on the back of significant new product capabilities

The world's top banks are leaving the legacy RDBMS that have powered their workloads for, in some cases, decades. Here's why.

Fault tolerance describes a system's ability to remain operational during errors, power outages, and other types of faults. How can you build a system that does that?

For seven companies interviewed by Greenoaks Capital Partners, switching to CockroachDB resulted in annual savings of $0.5M to $8M, as well as less downtime and more developer time spent on the product.

The B2B sales team at Cockroach Labs is filled with women who are crushing their goals. They share five expert tips on how to build a career in technical sales.

This blog post is an exploration of JSON parser performance, and, ultimately, a description of the high-performance JSON parser used in CockroachDB.

How a major global electronics company upgraded their database by moving from MySQL to CockroachDB — and saved $700k in just the first year.

Learn how SALTO Systems uses CockroachDB to build highly available access management technology.

What are the biggest challenges of application architecture today? What are the most efficient and innovative solutions to those challenges? Listen to the Big Ideas in App Architecture podcast.

In this tutorial you will learn how to use change data capture to send data from CockroachDB to Azure synapse for making business decisions based on real-time transactional data.

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

Learn about distributed transactions, and the advantages and disadvantages of three different methods for implementing them.

This blog is about building an interactive serverless application with Prisma, Remix, Netlify, and CockroachDB Serverless. Why did I choose Remix over Next.js?

Real-money gaming is growing in popularity. Here's how to build a resilient, performant application in the face of demanding users and complex regulations.

Every day we get a plethora of reactions to the name CockroachDB. In this blog you'll learn about the meaning and the origin of the name and you can watch customers react to it.

Breaking up the data in your database can make it more efficient and resilient. But it can also cause problems if you're not careful.

If you are building applications on GCP or AWS, chances are you have heard of VPC peering. This blog post explains what VPC peering is and when to use it.

CockroachDB Dedicated, the fully managed service of CockroachDB, is now PCI-DSS certified by a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) as a PCI Level 1 Service Provider.

Learn about transaction retry handling in CockroachDB – which types are handled automatically, and which types require handling in your application layer.

How to build flexible, correct, scalable, reliant Identity Access Management with Zanzibar inspired SpiceDB.

How to configure locality aware Backups in CockroachDB deployed in multi-region configurations with Azure.

In this article, we introduce the idea of Protected Timestamps: a novel way for CockroachDB to efficiently retain only relevant revisions, while safely garbage collecting old ones.

Learn how CockroachDB engineers rebuilt pieces of the system in order to efficiently delete large amounts of data while also retaining the MVCC history.

Learn how CockroachDB built a new index backfiller using an MVCC-compliant approach.

Learn how Cockroach Labs engineers rebuilt bulk operations in CockroachDB to preserve a history of what they changed.

Built In today announced that Cockroach Labs won in six categories on its 2023 Best Places To Work Awards, which include all of the lists we were eligible and nominated for.

Learn how to use Cloud IAM Roles from you CockroachDB clusters in CockroachDB 22.2

In application architecture discussions, "Kafka" comes up a lot, and for good reason: it plays an important role in many event-driven architectures. Here's how it works and why you might want to use it.

Learn how Hard Rock Digital has built a highly available and compliant sports betting application to serve users in different states with CockroachDB.

Learn how to use Change Data Capture (CDC) Queries to reduce costs and make your data pipeline more efficient.

Learn how to use Remix, Prisma, CockroachDB, and Tailwind to build a secret santa gift exchange application.

How CockroachDB uses control theory, studies CPU scheduler latencies, builds forms of cooperative scheduling, and patches the Go runtime.

Learn how to SSO to CockroachDB clusters using Json Web Tokens (JWT).

Learn when and how to use trigram indexes instead of Full Text Search with CockroachDB.

Probably the only computer scientist ever to have a warship named after them, the irreverent, sharp-tongued, and brilliant Grace Hopper pioneered the idea of automatic programming, developed the first compiler, and blazed a trail for women in tech.

Learn how you can make your distributed application more efficient by using UDFs in CockroachDB.