November 2020 Summaries

CockroachDB is an open-source distributed SQL database that has received significant contributions from its community. Over the course of its existence, it has had over 1590 commits from more than 320 external contributors across all its open source repositories. The company behind CockroachDB, Cockroach Labs, is grateful for these contributions and aims to encourage more by providing resources such as a CONTRIBUTING.md file, community Slack channel, and good first issue labels on GitHub. These efforts have led to the successful implementation of over 70 spatial functions in v20.2 and improvements to CockroachDB's ORMs. The company also participated in Hacktoberfest 2020 to encourage first-time open source contributors, resulting in 29 new CockroachDB apps and 33 closed Docs issues. To recognize external contributors, Cockroach Labs has set up a Hall of Fame with statistics on all contributions to CockroachDB. The company is always looking for more contributors and even offers job opportunities for those interested in becoming full-time contributors.

CockroachDB 20.2 has demonstrated a 40% improvement in performance on the TPC-C benchmark compared to its previous version, 19.2. The latest release can handle up to 140K warehouses with a maximum throughput of 1.7M transactions per minute (tpmC). This enhancement was achieved due to faster bulk data loading and more efficient foreign key checks and lookup joins. CockroachDB's performance improvements allow customers to manage larger workloads on their clusters, leading to cost savings.

Spatial data refers to any information that contains details about a specific location. It is commonly used in applications such as map services, IoT platforms, transportation and logistics companies, and environmental technology. Geographic data pertains to locations on the earth's surface, while geometric data involves two-dimensional surfaces. Examples of spatial data applications include IoT platform analytics, real-time sensor detection, operations research, supply chain management, flood risk analysis, and real-time natural disaster detection. PostGIS is a popular tool for working with spatial data, and CockroachDB now supports spatial data types, making it easier to build applications that leverage this type of information.

Adam Storm, a database nerd, shares his journey from working on DBMS development at IBM to joining Cockroach Labs. He started with memory management and autonomic computing at IBM before moving to distributed transactions and commodity hardware. He then worked on incorporating column stores into existing relational databases and built a hybrid transaction/analytical processing system. Finally, he led the creation of an IoT-optimized cloud-native database. After working as an executive, Storm left IBM to join Cockroach Labs due to its strong technology, mature product, and talented team. He shares advice for those starting in the database industry, emphasizing being a generalist, avoiding the money trap, and making one's own luck.

CockroachDB's Hacktoberfest 2020 project saw the creation of 29 apps and closure of 33 Docs issues. The company addressed concerns from its community about contributing to open source by curating beginner-friendly issues, creating a sample applications repository, and offering mentorship. This initiative allowed first-time contributors to make their mark in the open source world while learning new technologies. CockroachDB plans to continue engaging with its community through future events like MLH Hackathons and maintaining an active presence on its community slack channel.

Cockroach Labs has added distributed backup and restore functionality to its free, open source option, CockroachDB Core. This feature was previously only available in the paid version of the database management system. The move is aimed at helping small teams build data-intensive applications with reliable disaster recovery options. Prior to this update, CockroachDB Core users had access to a single-machine backup tool called DUMP, which did not meet the needs of many customers building modern, data-heavy applications. With the addition of distributed backups and restore functionality, CockroachDB Core now offers binary backups, corruption checks, backup scheduling, and more.

Cockroach Labs has released CockroachDB 20.2, a distributed SQL database designed for building data-intensive applications with high availability and elastic scale. The latest version includes updates to make developers more productive across a broader range of workloads, improved security and management capabilities, and significant performance improvements. Notably, the majority of these new features are available in CockroachDB Core, the free community option. Key updates include support for storing and indexing spatial data using PostGIS-compatible SQL syntax, deployment and management enhancements with CockroachDB on Kubernetes, and improved database performance.

Cockroach Labs has been inducted into the JPMorgan Chase Hall of Innovation for its work helping the financial services giant build next-generation applications and infrastructure. The company joins past winners such as Tableau and Confluent, and is one of only 25 companies to be inducted in the last decade. Cockroach Labs' work with JPMorgan Chase includes modernizing global data centers and building new applications for customer service. This award signifies growing demand for operational data infrastructure as organizations worldwide accelerate development of cloud-native, distributed applications and services.

In this webinar, we discussed how CockroachDB ensures data security with features like encryption at rest, TLS for secure connections, and RBAC for access control. We also covered the importance of VPC peering in a multi-cloud environment and how it can be used to improve security by isolating traffic between different cloud providers. Additionally, we touched upon CockroachDB's integration with external tools like Splunk and Datadog for monitoring and alerting purposes. Finally, we highlighted the importance of logging and audit trails in maintaining a secure environment and how CockroachDB is working on improving these features to better serve its customers.