Blog
Santander: Hacking human error to achieve operational resilience
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.
Michelle Gienow
November 1, 2023
The Halloween Problem: a spooky (and true) SQL story
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.
Charlie Custer
October 31, 2023
SQL performance best practices: performance tuning to speed up your database
Learn how to optimize your relational database for better performance, including tuning queries, adding indexes, adjusting your schema, and more!
Charlie Custer
October 23, 2023
Accidentally multi-cloud: Mergers, acquisitions, and deployments
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.
Domenic Ravita
October 20, 2023
Product
RoachFest23 Recap: DoorDash, City Storage Systems, Booking.com, Santander, and more shared their CockroachDB journeys
More than 500 attendees from around the globe recently swarmed into New York for RoachFest23, the annual user conference for CockroachDB customers. The two day event featured thirty speakers from some of the world’s leading enterprise companies including engineering leads and directors at Santander, DoorDash, City Storage Systems (also known as Cloud Kitchens), Booking.com, Fortinet, and many more. The Cockroach Labs co-founders also led sessions, shared the future of CockroachDB, and released new features and capabilities now available in CockroachDB.
Michelle Gienow
October 19, 2023
Product
High CPU usage in Postgres: how to detect it, and how to fix it
High CPU usage can bring your database – and with it, your application – grinding to a halt. This is, unfortunately, a fairly common problem. But it also can be a relatively easy fix. Let’s take a look at how to check CPU usage in Postgres, and how to troubleshoot for some of the most common causes of high CPU usage.
Charlie Custer
October 16, 2023
Design
What is multi-region architecture? The key to high availability & risk mitigation
Nearly every business has tier 0 applications that are critical for delivering their services to customers: these are the applications that make the money. Any disruption or downtime can result in significant financial losses and damage to a company’s reputation. Adopting multi-region application architecture mitigates these risks and ensures high availability. In this blog post, we will explore the concept of multi-region application architecture and discuss how it helps in risk mitigation while providing high availability.
Michelle Gienow
October 11, 2023
Product
What is a distributed database and how do they work?
The cloud is, by definition, a distributed system. Distributed application architecture is mainstream in the world of software — you wouldn’t build any other way. For more than a decade, though, the database has lagged behind. The architecture of traditional relational databases frequently conflicts with the architectural needs of modern cloud applications: horizontal scale, elasticity, and microservices.
Charlie Custer
October 9, 2023
Product
Multi-region architecture for new market expansion
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