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In simple terms, a relational (SQL) database stores structured data that conforms to a predefined schema. A document-model (or NoSQL) database stores documents that may contain unstructured data without a schema. At least, that’s the way that these two database storage models have traditionally been discussed.

Jim Walker

July 7, 2022

To show how easy it is to use CockroachDB in a real-world project, we’re going to build and deploy a production-ready application with basic CRUD functionality. Together, we’ll build a Ruby on Rails application that simulates a game leaderboard, using Active Record to talk with our CockroachDB Serverless database. Cockroach Labs maintains the ActiveRecord Adapter Gem, a direct extension of the PostgreSQL adapter. This makes it very straightforward to switch from a default option to CockroachDB. We’ll be using Ruby 3.0 to build a Rails app running Rails version 6.1.4. At the end of the tutorial, we’ll deploy the application to the internet on Heroku, which is running on AWS behind the scenes.

These past two years have been a kind of golden age code livestreams. Stuck at home, developers took to their OBS setups to share their coding projects with their peers. And viewers tuned in to watch a fellow developer struggle through a programming issue, get stuck, google things, and eventually figure things out, and found their coding communities in the process.

Amruta Ranade

June 30, 2022

One of the most interesting questions we get to dig into in our annual Cloud Report is which CPUs offer the best performance – and more importantly, the best price for performance – for large OLTP workloads. To answer that question (among others) we test dozens of instance types across the three major public clouds – AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Charlie Custer

June 29, 2022

Relational databases are great for transactional workloads. But things can get messy when multiple transactions start trying to access the same data at the same time. Luckily, in many SQL databases there’s a solution for that: SELECT FOR UPDATE.

Charlie Custer

June 27, 2022

Learn how to make your Python application multi-region. And then learn how to domicile data at the row level for better application performance and compliance with regulations.

What is metadata, exactly? Metadata is data about other data. That’s a very broad definition, though. When you start trying to get specific, it can get murky pretty quickly. In our experience with our customers, we see “metadata” commonly used to describe two different sorts of use cases

Charlie Custer

June 24, 2022

We depend on financial companies and services to help us navigate just about everything — to the point where they’re basically a form of critical infrastructure, at least existentially speaking. (Try to imagine getting through the rest of your day right now if your credit card froze or your financial services were suddenly unavailable. Do you have enough cash on you to buy lunch, or a ticket/tank of gas to drive home?). In such a complex and far-reaching sector, there are many ways things can go wrong. And, unfortunately, as your platform/application/services grow, the number of possible stress points scales right along with them.

Michelle Gienow

June 23, 2022

Over the past year, Cockroach Labs has been working hard to give our observability tooling some extra love. When it comes to monitoring our cloud products, such as CockroachDB Dedicated, meeting our customers where they are is one of our primary goals. Many organizations already have a platform in place to monitor their systems, and we’d like them to feel right at home when it comes to monitoring their CockroachDB cluster. But with so many platforms available in the ever-changing observability market today, like Datadog, Amazon CloudWatch, and more, how do we stay flexible in our observability tooling? The popular tools of today are not guaranteed to stand the test of time. Therefore, we need a platform for third party monitoring integrations that’s flexible enough to support both the platforms of today, as well as those of tomorrow. For Cockroach Labs, we chose the OpenTelemetry Collector to serve as such a platform and to integrate with Datadog as the first of what we hope to someday be a substantial library of third party integrations. This blog post discusses the capabilities of the OpenTelemetry Collector and how we introduced it into our cloud infrastructure.