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How does DoorDash keep 1.9PB of data and 1.2M QPS highly available? That’s the kind of question that keeps enterprise engineers up at night. And while the right database software can make it easier, achieving high availability at scale is never easy.

Charlie Custer

February 7, 2024

Ever been cruising along on some work that’s going really well when your laptop suddenly bricks? Or maybe you’re about to join an important meeting when Zoom announces it has to update right now and takes itself offline to install and restart? We’ve all been there. Which means we have all experienced first hand the disruption, the frustration, and occasionally the keyboard-pounding rage of downtime. Now imagine 100000 x’ing that pain up to full-scale organization level where downtime happens for everyone, all at the same time. We’ve all seen the headlines: Airline Cancels Thousands of Flights Due to Network Outages or Cloud Region Failure Makes Retailer Websites Go Dark on Black Friday, Busiest Shopping Day of the Year. The technical definition of downtime is “a period of time when technology services are unavailable to users”. This elegant simplicity, however, completely misses both the potentially serious business impacts and the deeply human pain that results whenever downtime disrupts work. The online sports betting service whose customers simply switch their wagers to a competing platform (and then never come back) The business traveler parent who misses their kid’s birthday party because their flight got canceled, or the small artisan counting on Black Friday sales to take their business into the black.

Michelle Gienow

March 13, 2024

The creation of a truly new category within tech is a rare moment. The emergence of a significant new category that will transform the tech landscape is the result of clear vision and underlying shifts in the market. Given that innovation is a constant in tech, however, how do we identify when an emerging technology will have genuine long-term impact? How do we know there is a truly new “category”? There are three characteristics of any emerging category: Adoption and momentum: There is a building group of companies and individuals receiving and creating new value from the “new” approach. A collection of interests: There is an emerging set of best practices and general curiosity from individuals and companies around the new tech Market recognition: People spend money on it, and those that analyze industries start to track and study the new technology.

Jim Walker

March 12, 2024

Today we’re excited to announce the release of CockroachDB 21.1, the latest version of our distributed SQL database. For this release, we took a step back and asked how we can make even more development teams successful with multi-region clusters. Thousands of engineering hours and Github tickets later, the result of our efforts is a dramatically simpler and more accessible developer experience for managing the location of data.

Meagan Goldman

February 7, 2024