January 2021 Summaries

Cockroach Labs has introduced Connect and Contribute (C&C) Days, a program that allows employees to dedicate company time towards learning, volunteering, or making positive changes in their communities. The initiative encourages employee engagement in various causes and supports the company's mission of putting people first. While C&C days are not mandatory nor holidays, they are encouraged, with managers asked to limit meetings on these days to maximize impact.

CockroachDB provides a DB Console for developers and operators to monitor their clusters. The console offers access to important cluster data such as Metrics, Databases, Sessions (new in CockroachDB 20.2), Transactions (new in CockroachDB 20.2), Statements, and more. Operators can use the DB Console to evaluate node status, replication health, and key metrics like CPU, memory, and disk usage. Developers can observe their workloads and sessions, transactions, and statements that comprise them. The Sessions page allows developers to find and cancel problematic active sessions, while the Transactions page provides visibility into transaction fingerprints on a new transactions page in the DB Console. SQL shell users can access this information directly through CockroachDB Internal Tables or by using SHOW SESSIONS, SHOW TRANSACTIONS, and SHOW QUERIES commands.

In 2021, with physical stores shutting down due to the pandemic, online shopping has become the new reality of retail. Retailers must adapt their business strategies and focus on providing a seamless digital shopping experience to survive in this competitive environment. CockroachDB offers three key strategies for retailers to achieve their revenue goals: 1) leveraging data effectively to provide an excellent customer experience, 2) scaling to reach larger audiences by expanding globally, and 3) avoiding costly downtime and outages. By implementing these strategies with the help of CockroachDB, retailers can improve their bottom line and thrive in the era of COVID-19.

CockroachDB has hosted several interns over the years who have worked on various projects. Two notable projects from their most recent batch include read-based compaction heuristics and query denylists. The first project, led by Aaditya Sondhi, focused on introducing read-based compactions to Pebble, a storage engine based on log-structured merge trees (LSMs). This was done to lower read amplification for subsequent reads, thus lowering resource utilization and improving read performance. The second project, led by Angela Wen, involved the introduction of a mechanism to gate certain classes of queries from being run against the database. This was motivated by the need to deny queries-of-death during emergent situations. Other interns worked on projects such as query runtime statistics, design tokens, quorum recovery, metamorphic schema changes, and import compatibility.

GDPR compliance is challenging for companies due to its focus on data privacy and protection. The guiding principle of GDPR is "privacy by design," which requires security best practices to be implemented from the ground up. CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database, can help with GDPR compliance by encrypting data in flight and at rest, as well as supporting data domiciling through its geo-partitioning feature. This allows companies to process and store data locally, reducing costs associated with cross-border data transfers and improving customer-perceived latencies.

CockroachDB v20.2 introduces automatic redaction of users' sensitive data from log files, ensuring that Cockroach Labs never receives it. This feature is part of the company's commitment to maintaining user trust by not viewing their most sensitive information (e.g., healthcare and finance data). The new redactable string data type helps separate sensitive and non-sensitive data in error messages and log files, allowing more useful information to be shared while preventing any sensitive data from leaking out. This feature is a step towards improving the sharing of data between CockroachDB users and Cockroach Labs, with future enhancements aimed at distinguishing between "operational" and "application" data in log files and error payloads.

The 2021 Cloud Report by Cockroach Labs has found that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) outperforms Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in terms of throughput, CPU performance, network latency, and storage I/O. GCP delivered the most throughput on all four benchmarks: network throughput, storage I/O read throughput, storage I/O write throughput, and maximum tpm throughput. In terms of CPU performance, AWS's custom-built Graviton2 Processor outperformed Intel and AMD processors in the 16-core benchmark. AWS also had unbeatable network latencies for three years running. Azure's ultra disks were found to be worth the expense, while GCP's general purpose disk matched performance of advanced disk offerings from AWS and Azure. The report suggests that more nodes, memory, and better CPUs are better investments than advanced disks for improving OLTP performance.

Cockroach Labs has implemented creative solutions for fostering social learning among its remote engineering team. The company's onboarding period, MOLTing, includes at least three pair programming sessions with different engineers to help new hires learn the code base and product knowledge. Additionally, "Watch Me Work" Office Hours have been introduced, where senior engineers stream their work processes on Twitch or Google Meet for others to observe and ask questions. These programs aim to facilitate organic learning experiences and encourage collaboration among team members, regardless of their physical location.

Bose has developed a platform as a service using open source tools such as CockroachDB, Elasticsearch, and Kubernetes. The company's Galapagos team aims to modernize its software by bringing cloud-connected experiences to all devices. They have adopted microservices architecture which led to the need for quickly spinning up data stores behind services. To address this, Bose extended Kubernetes to allow easy access to Elasticsearch, CockroachDB, and other popular data stores with a powerful, cost-effective, scalable, reliable solution. The tech stack also includes Kafka/MongoDB/Postgres for low availability versions of CockroachDB and Redis for sharing memory with other applications. Galapagos' goal is to create low friction ways for developers to work and use unfamiliar tools quickly and easily.

Cockroach Labs has raised $160 million at a valuation of $2 billion, reflecting its rapid growth and product innovation. The company's cloud-native SQL database, CockroachDB, has seen significant adoption from businesses adapting to the digital shift caused by the pandemic. With this funding, Cockroach Labs plans to continue investing in product development and expanding its staff to support its growing customer base.