Blog
FinTech
When crypto prices rise, the fortunes of this dynamic sector’s service providers also increase. However, industry upswings have a hazard: Rapid growth can mean outgrowing your database.
David Weiss
January 22, 2025
scalability
resilience
fintech
SaaS
Reference Architecture
Managing the digital keys to the kingdom: how to achieve control over your IAM data
For many organizations, identity access management (IAM) systems are like the digital keys to the kingdom and the foundation for their day-to-day operations. Building and maintaining an IAM system can be extremely complex if you aren’t using the right infrastructure to support your business needs. In a previous post, we examined why IAM is critical to businesses, the challenges associated with building an IAM system, and compared a centralized vs. distributed system. Here we will discuss how you can achieve granular control over your IAM data in a distributed environment.
Cassie McAllister
January 21, 2025
Product
Why Fortune 50 banks are leaving traditional RDBMS for CockroachDB
In the world of finance, changing databases is usually pretty rare. When you’re in charge of other people’s money — several trillion dollars of it, in the case of one of the banks discussed in this article — even small changes could represent major risks. That’s why even today, many banks still run systems based on legacy relational databases such as Oracle, IBM, and PostgreSQL — often the same databases they were using 10 or even 20 years ago.
Charlie Custer
January 16, 2025
Scale & Resilience
Guides
Big Ideas for 2025: What is “data modernization” today?
Data modernization has been a critical aspect of technological evolution throughout recent history – it has simply taken on different forms based on the economic, business, and societal needs at the time. In a recent episode of Big Ideas in App Architecture, two expert Cockroach Labs sales engineers – David Joy and Jim Hatcher – discussed data modernization’s intriguing evolution, highlighting key shifts and trends that are unfolding.
Becca Weng
January 14, 2025
Scale & Resilience
Preparing for the “New Normal”: How to Minimize the Impact of IT Outages
High-profile outages and performance constraints underscore the acute need for systems capable of adapting to the modern world. Take the recent Crowdstrike outage, which affected various industries, including finance, healthcare, and notably aviation: Thousands of flights were cancelled, and many hospitals worldwide had to cancel non-emergency procedures as they were unable to access patient data.
Becca Weng
January 13, 2025
SaaS
Reference Architecture
Building a real-world IAM system: centralized vs. distributed
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been locked out of your banking app, a hotel room, your work computer, your car, your Gmail… the list goes on. You know the reason your access was blocked was because you either forgot your keys/password or had the incorrect login credentials. Businesses of every kind implement identity and access management (IAM) systems for your protection, and their own. Failure to protect humans and resources can easily result in devastating consequences.
Cassie McAllister
January 8, 2025
Tutorials
Cockroach Labs Launches Instructor-Led Training Course: “CockroachDB Fundamentals for Application Development”
Cockroach Labs has announced the availability of our new instructor-led training course, “CockroachDB Fundamentals for Application Development.” This course is the first in a series of live educational offerings from Cockroach Labs, designed to ensure that organizations make the most of CockroachDB.
David Weiss
January 7, 2025
Product
Comparing CockroachDB and PostgreSQL
Before we begin a comparison blog post about PostgreSQL, we must first acknowledging that it is one of the most reliable and widely used databases in the history of software. The world owes a debt of gratitude to the open source community that has built and supported this important project for the last 35 years. In this post, we unpack some of the architectural differences between PostgreSQL and CockroachDB. We’ll point out where the limitations of single server, single instance architecture might pose challenges for modern cloud infrastructure, and how a distributed foundation can be a better solution for your apps and services.
Jim Walker
January 6, 2025
Generative AI
Scale & Resilience
2024: Resilience, AI, Distributed SQL, and Momentum
As we head into the new year, it’s the perfect time to look back on what was a big year for Cockroach Labs. 2024 has been memorable for us, in so many ways. Our company grew to over 500 employees; we moved both our Bangalore and Austin offices to larger spaces to accommodate our growth; we took our annual customer conference, RoachFest, global for the first time. We also celebrated the 50th episode of our podcast, Big Ideas in App Architecture, which has featured tech leaders from Cameo, Estée Lauder, DoorDash, Confluent, and more.
Becca Weng
December 30, 2024
Scale & Resilience
AWS
Aurora DSQL is in preview – A first comparison with CockroachDB
At AWS re:Invent 2024, AWS announced the latest edition to their database offerings: Aurora DSQL, which is now in Preview. The fact that AWS, a company with $100+ billion in ARR, is investing in distributed SQL, is further confirmation of what our founders and team have bet on for nearly a decade: distributed SQL solves a lot of business-critical problems, and it’s a solution that is here to stay. In short – competition is validation. While we’re thrilled that DSQL undoubtedly will drive more interest and choice in the area of distributed SQL databases, it is important to highlight some of the notable differences between DSQL and CockroachDB.
Ray Austin
December 27, 2024