The Cockroach Labs Blog

As a leading distributed SQL database, CockroachDB, provides a number of capabilities to allow organizations and users to recover from disaster. Physical Cluster Replication, or PCR for short, is one such feature that enables operators to add "warm standby" clusters to their most critical CockroachDB deployments as an added layer of resilience and disaster preparedness in what is often called an "active-passive" configuration.

David Taylor

February 10, 2025

Transitioning from legacy mainframe systems to distributed databases marks a monumental shift for any organization. While the promise of scalability, cost-efficiency, and enhanced performance is compelling, the migration process itself presents significant challenges.

Amine El Kouhen, Ph.D.

February 5, 2025

One of the biggest technical challenges of inventory management is keeping data consistent in real time, or as close to it as possible. Particularly with larger operations, this is vital to avoid “overselling” scenarios that can cost the company money or damage its reputation.

Jeffrey White

February 3, 2025

In the context of a database and how it’s organized, the term database schema describes the structure of the data and how the elements within the database relate to each other. This information is often presented visually with diagrams that illustrate how different tables and elements connect and to give you a logical view of the entire database. However, the schema itself exists in the database as the coded rules that define the data’s structure and relationships.

Charlie Custer

January 27, 2025

As businesses increasingly demand scalability, resilience, and flexibility, transitioning from traditional centralized systems to distributed architectures has become a critical strategic move.

Amine El Kouhen, Ph.D.

January 23, 2025

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

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

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.

Cassie McAllister

January 16, 2025

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