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In this post we’re going to talk about one of the techniques that can be used in CockroachDB for getting good performance from databases accessed from multiple geographical regions: follower reads. These are operations presenting a slightly stale view of data, which can be served with local latencies from different regions.

I once went to a website that had “hours of operation,” and was only “open” when its brick and mortar counterpart had its lights on. I felt perplexed and a little frustrated; computers are capable of running all day every day, so why shouldn’t they? I’d been habituated to the internet’s incredible availability guarantees. However, before the internet, 24/7 high availability wasn’t “a thing.” Availability was desirable, but not something to which we felt fundamentally entitled. We used computers only when we needed them; they weren’t waiting idly by on the off-chance a request came by. As the internet grew, those previously uncommon requests at 3am local time became prime business hours partway across the globe, and making sure that a computer could facilitate the request was important.

Jessica Edwards

March 23, 2023

At Cockroach Labs, the past year has been filled with some extraordinary transformations. Today I’m pleased to mark another milestone, as we showcase our business acceleration and expansion, customer growth, and a new addition to our executive team. We started this company as a small team frustrated with the lack of sophisticated database technology in the open source ecosystem. Since then, CockroachDB has helped some of the world’s best companies power their mission-critical workloads with a level of sophistication worthy of the promise of the global cloud. It has been exhilarating to see CockroachDB evolve into a product adopted by innovators in the Fortune 500.

Spencer Kimball

March 22, 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

Modern businesses run on data. Storing, organizing, managing, and accessing the increasingly complex and large volumes of data required to operate any business at scale accounts for a big chunk — 20% — of all IT infrastructure spending.

Charlie Custer

March 9, 2023

The enterprise sales team at Cockroach Labs is filled with women who are crushing their goals. Here is a quick look into a few of their career growth stories, the challenges they faced along the way, and their advice for other women looking to join the field.

JSON is a ubiquitous data interchange format supported by many systems, including CockroachDB. Historically, at CockroachDB, the majority of our efforts around JSON focused on supporting various JSON functions, operators, and inverted indexes while our JSON parser did not receive much attention. And for a good reason. If you are reading this blog, then you probably already appreciate Golang. There are many aspects to like in Go, and one of them is an excellent collection of standard (and third party) libraries. Becase Go ships with a “jack-of-all-trades” JSON parser out of the box (encoding/json library), it made sense for CockroachDB to use a standard parser when converting strings to internal JSON representation. However, at some point, we began to wonder if the time had arrived for us to invest in finding a better, more performant alternative.

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

When you tap a hotel keycard on your door handle and hear the satisfying buzz and click of a deadbolt electronically unlocking you’ve likely just used a SALTO Systems product. SALTO is a leader in cloud-based access management technology. They manufacture advanced, flexible, and secure wireless electronic access control technology. SALTO’s products are available in over 40 countries and they have over 40M daily active users accessing over 5M equipped devices. They are leading the movement to replace mechanical keys with digital keys. As part of their strategy for leading this movement they are building flexible infrastructure with CockroachDB.

Cassie McAllister

March 1, 2023