I’m a database nerd. Or, to be more precise, a DBMS nerd. But back in university, I avoided the Databases course at all costs.

Distributed BACKUPs and RESTORE are now in CockroachDB Core to provide reliable, valuable Disaster Recovery for all CockroachDB applications.

The CockroachDB dialect for Hibernate is officially available 🥳 Hibernate now offers first-class support for CockroachDB, so get building in Java and CRDB.

Today we’re introducing Pebble, a RocksDB-inspired and RocksDB compatible key-value store written in Go that brings greater stability to CockroachDB.

Database schema design is difficult. Requirements evolve, and somtimes columns have to change types. CockroachDB enables ALTER COLUMN TYPE without taking tables offline.

Lateral joins - similar to nested foreign loops - are a type of correlated subquery that allow data sources to reference columns provided by previous data sources in the same query. Give them a spin in CockroachDB.

What do nested transactions look like in an ACID environment? We explore the journey of a nested SQL transaction in CockroachDB in this post.

"CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database," a research paper codifying years of research on CockroachDB, will be shared at ACM SIGMOD 2020.

As of our 20.1 release, CockroachDB supports online primary key changes. This means that it's now possible to change the primary key of a table while performing read and write operations on the table. In this blog, we'll review how data is stored in CockroachDB and how we overcame technical challenges involved in getting online schema changes to work in CockroachDB.

We want to give you a database that allows you to quickly and simply build and manage data-intensive applications in the cloud—without worrying about the performance, scale or resilience of those apps. To support that mission, our latest release includes updates that let you build fast and build to last.

If someone knows even a little about Spanner, the first question they have is: "How does CockroachDB provide external consistency without atomic clocks?"

How we built native support for hash sharded indexes in CockroachDB, which can significantly improve performance on sequential workloads.

Key learnings about how to get the best performance from GCP, AWS, and Azure based on original research and conversations with the big three.

At Cockroach Labs, we’re focusing on diversity and inclusion in our college and university recruiting. Here’s what we've learned so far.

The 2020 Cloud Report compares AWS, GCP, and Azure on microbenchmarks and customer-like-workloads to understand performance tradeoffs within each cloud.

Peewee ORM now supports CockroachDB. And now it's easy to get started with the distributed, horizontally-scalable SQL database.

In this blog post, we introduce Follower reads, a key feature for supporting multi-region reads with low latency when your use case can accept stale data.

Yugabyte frequently compares themselves to CockroachDB. We investigated their claims. This is our analysis of CockroachDB vs. Yugabyte v2.0.0.

SQL Prober: How we used geo-partitioning to build a monitoring system that fits our distributed architecture.

In this post, we explore the steps we've taken so far--and plan to take--to improve the CockroachDB cost-based optimizer through query caching.

How a vectorized (column by column instead of row by row) approach to merge joins led to a 3x improvement in standard merge joins in CockroachDB.

CockroachDB is an excellent system of record, but no technology exists in a vacuum. That's why we built our version of Change Data Capture, which we call the changefeed.

After two years of nightly testing, we’ve come to learn the power and limitations of Jepsen as a testing tool.

How we built a 40x faster hash joiner using vectorized execution.

CockroachDB's Consistency Model fits somewhere between serializability and linerarizability. We're proposing a new marketing phrase for CRDB's guarantees: no stale reads.

CockroachDB uses RocksDB for its storage engine because of RocksDB's rich feature set, which is necessary for a complex product like a distributed SQL database.

This post introduces Transactional Pipelining which dramatically speeds up distributed transactions with respect to the latency cost of distributed consensus.

This blog covers the practical experience of running a distributed system across multiple Kubernetes clusters including what makes it challenging and what solutions are available (some of which we run in production).

CockroachDB 2.1 includes a brand-new, built-from-scratch, cost-based SQL optimizer. This post explains what a cost-based SQL optimizer is, and tells the story of how we decided we really, really needed one.

sqlfmt is an opinionated SQL formatter. It’s not designed to be completely customizable, and we hope to remove options over time. Use it and stop thinking about how to format SQL.

CockroachDB was so named because of its ability to survive failures. In this post, we will cover architectural considerations when building high availability services on top of CockroachDB.

If your default mode of thinking is SNAPSHOT, write skew anomalies are just normal behaviour and SERIALIZABLE is throwing away perfectly good histories.

CockroachDB is PostgreSQL compatible in order to be accessible to an ecosystem of drivers, existing code, and developer knowledge.

With JSON support in CockroachDB, you can now use both structured and semi-structured data within the same database.

Scaling a database beyond one zone is a challenge. Here's some strategies on how to approach it.

Most databases treat strong transaction isolation as exotic, expecting applications to work with faster but unsafe isolation modes that can expose them to subtle bugs. CockroachDB provides SERIALIZABLE transactions by default, ensuring you always see the consistency you expect.

This post explains how CAP-Consistent systems can be highly available, how the CAP theorem applies to CockroachDB, and why consistency is the better choice.

In August, we wrote about our concerted stability effort. Today, we've more than achieved our CockroachDB stability goal of running a 100-node cluster.

Some months ago I started work on a way to test random, valid SQL in CockroachDB. This is important to expose unintended behavior in our server.

Running CockroachDB on Kubernetes pairs its built-in replication and survivability with Kubernetes’ process management, creating a highly available system.

The good news is that CockroachDB’s JOIN seems to work, as in, “it returns correct results.” However, this is just our first, unoptimimized implementation.

If we abandoned our earthly constraints, how could we improve consensus algorithms? Specifically, what would it take to make them faster?

Writing good tests is tricky when the system has a lot of moving parts. In this post we will go over how to outsmart Go dependencies in testing.

Adopting SQL had an unexpected consequence; it forced us to dabble in language design. In this post, we detail our approach to SQL typing in CockroachDB.

CockroachDB's support for SQL means access to a variety of data frameworks and tools. Today, we'll build a simple application in Python using SQLAlchemy...

To protect concurrent transactions from anomalies that can break the consistency of CockroachDB, we require an Isolation guarantee...

In this post, we will go over some of the factors involved in choosing the best index to use for running a certain query.

We at Cockroach Labs absolutely love Aphyr's work. We are avid readers of the Jepsen series – which some know as high quality reviews of correctness...

This is the story of the detection, investigation, and fix of just one performance bug.

GitHub stars are a simple way for GitHub users to bookmark repos that interest them. "Stargazers" is a tool to query GitHub for information about the stars.

I experimented with implementing the Redis protocol on top of CockroachDB, scratching the itch on the question: Could CockroachDB ever replace Redis?

Cgo is an important part of Go: It's your window to calling anything that anything that has C bindings. But while cgo works for us, it hasn’t come for free.

In this post, we’ll share a few powerful optimizations that mitigate many of the performance problems common to Go garbage collection.

The first question many developers ask us is what our experience has been writing a distributed database in Go, a garbage-collected language.

SQL? I thought CockroachDB was a key-value store?!? In the past we described CockroachDB as a distributed, transactionally consistent, key-value store.

One of the headline features of CockroachDB is its full support for ACID transactions across a distributed database. In this post, we’ll explain...

In CockroachDB, we use the Raft consensus algorithm to ensure that your data remains consistent even when machines fail.

Today, we’re launching CockroachDB for everyone. Use it. Build on it. Contribute to it!