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The Roacher spotlight series is a celebration of our Roachers, their stories, and the wisdom they can impart to their peers. In our inaugural post, we sat down with Jen Murphy to tell her Cockroach Labs story.

Imagine you’re watching a baseball game. In the middle of the fifth inning, your pitcher throws a strike, and then another one. The fan sitting next to you jumps to his feet in jubilant celebration. You could be forgiven for wondering what’s going on. After all, it takes three strikes to get a batter out – why is this guy dancing like the game is already over?

Charlie Custer

December 14, 2021

Online gambling is one of the fastest-growing industries on the planet, with the market expected to be worth more than $127 billion by 2027. But it’s also a very challenging vertical for app development.

Charlie Custer

December 8, 2021

Like all software systems, metrics are crucial for understanding the inner workings of a system and getting a pulse on how that system is functioning. Any monitoring and debugging framework is incomplete without metrics.

The gaming industry is all about delivering a great end-user experience which means building relationships with players that last years, not days. They can do this by instilling predictability, reliability, and creating a strong brand by giving players what they want: a new and better gaming experience each time. However, the success of a new game or platform is often unpredictable. A game can become successful overnight and the amount of concurrent players can surge within a few hours causing slowdowns or the inability to login. Or the game may never reach a certain level of popularity that it needed to see a ROI.

Cassie McAllister

December 3, 2021

As a developer, you may not have spent a lot of time thinking about database connections. A single database connection is not expensive, but as things scale up, problems can emerge. So let’s (ahem) dive into the world of connection pooling, and take a look at how it can help us build more performant applications, especially when we’re operating at scale.

Charlie Custer

November 30, 2021

As cloud-native web developers, we want to build apps that scale easily. Databases are often a pain point, though. We want the structure and data integrity of relational databases like PostgreSQL, but we also want the easy scalability of NoSQL databases like MongoDB. Until recently, we’ve been forced to choose one or the other. Fortunately, CockroachDB provides the best of both worlds. It’s a robust relational database with full SQL support and all of the features you’d expect in an enterprise-ready database. It supports the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so you can use it with most tools and libraries that support Postgres. But that’s not all: it offers excellent scalability, so you no longer have to choose between relational data integrity or NoSQL scalability. And, if you use CockroachDB Serverless, you don’t have to worry about hosting and scaling a database yourself — so you can focus your efforts on building great apps. This tutorial will show you how to start from scratch and build a modern cloud-native web app using TypeScript, React, Prisma, Netlify serverless functions, and CockroachDB.

Whether you are streaming to an analytics platform for business intelligence or building event-driven services, CockroachDB’s change data capture (CDC) capabilities are powerful and adaptable to your application needs. But how can you leverage your changefeed setup to get the performance that best fits your application? Most changefeed settings & cluster settings outlined here will have some tradeoff associated with them. Going in, you should have an understanding of what you are targeting and compromises you are willing to make. We recommend testing your configuration under your workloads!

Dealing with slow database performance? One potential cause of this problem is database contention. Even if you’re not struggling with a slow database right now, database contention is important to understand. The contention monster often doesn’t rear its ugly head until an application has reached significant scale. It’s best to be prepared, so in this article we’re going to look at both how to avoid contention issues and how to diagnose and resolve them when they do arise. But first, we have to understand what they are.

Charlie Custer

November 22, 2021