View all

A few days ago, we (Artem and Chris) were working with two different customers that had the same requirement: they needed to encrypt certain tables in their databases. This is not uncommon. Encryption comes with a slight performance penalty, so many companies prefer not to encrypt their entire database. Instead, the best practice is to encrypt only the tables that contain sensitive information, so less-sensitive data can be accessed without the overhead the encryption creates.

Optimal Systems came to CockroachDB with the best kind of problem: they had become too successful. Optimal was founded in 1991 to meet the European Space Agency’s need to archive its satellite photos. Decades of successful growth saw the storage product they built for the ESA evolve and expand to serve clients in more than 30 countries.

Charlie Custer

June 23, 2021

As we outlined in Deploy a Multi-Region Application in Just 3 Steps, we’ve made major changes to simplify the multi-region configuration in CockroachDB. The new abstractions allow users to think of multi-region databases and tables in three ways:

As an SRE on the CockroachDB Dedicated team, we have the unique challenge of monitoring and managing a fleet of CockroachDB clusters around the globe. Perhaps needless to say, as a distributed database, security is an utmost priority for us. To address some of the needs related to security and monitoring (for example intrusion detection audit logging), we’ve invested in our next generation of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) infrastructure.

We are thrilled to share that finance and strategy veteran Lorenzo Montesi has joined Cockroach Labs as our Chief Financial Officer. Lorenzo could not have joined our team at a better time, as we continue our rapid growth in the cloud data market. With our $160 million fundraise at a valuation of $2 billion earlier this year, adoption of our evolutionary database CockroachDB is exploding. Lorenzo will drive our financial planning, analysis, and operations, working closely with our leadership team to scale Cockroach Labs globally during this significant growth phase.

Imagine this: you work in system architecture for a multibillion-dollar consumer-facing business, and it’s the middle of a busy weekend. Suddenly, your database goes down. Transactions aren’t processing. Customers are angry. Logistical issues are stacking up because inventory and warehouse tracking are down. Customer service reps are swamped, but half of the technical staff are twiddling their thumbs because they can’t do their work without a functional database.

Charlie Custer

June 3, 2021

We are pleased to announce that our second paper, Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB, will appear in the Industry Track of the ACM SIGMOD 2022 conference in Philadelphia, PA (as well as remotely), on June 12-17. This paper is the sequel to our SIGMOD 2020 paper in which we introduced CockroachDB’s geo-distributed capabilities to the world.

Slow applications kill business. Greg Lindon (in this now archived deck), noted that 100ms in latency lowered Amazon’s sales by 1%. Marissa Mayer pointed out that speed really matters when she explained the results of A/B tests as “500ms of additional load time dropped Google searches by 20%.”

Andy Woods

May 20, 2021

For many engineers, thinking about spending countless hours of studying for coding interviews leaves them exhausted before they even get started. At Cockroach Labs, we have open sourced the interview process on Github to create familiarity for candidates and removed resumes and utilized exercise-based interviews to reduce bias. Beginning in mid-2017, we engaged with our engineering team on how we can make our engineering interview process less intimidating and more fair, resulting in better hiring decisions.

Lindsay Grenawalt

May 17, 2021