June 2021 Summaries

Foreign keys are constraints that link a column in one table to a column in another table, ensuring that a value can be added to the first only if it already exists in the second. They help maintain referential integrity across databases and prevent errors by preventing operations with invalid data. In SQL, foreign key rules can be set when creating tables, and actions for handling updates or deletions can also be specified. Foreign keys are crucial in establishing relationships between tables and ensuring consistency within a database.

Nubank, a leading Brazilian financial technology company valued at $35 billion, has chosen CockroachDB as the scalable SQL database for its critical credit card authorization service. As Nubank's business rapidly grew from 12 million customers in 2019 to 40 million in 2021, it needed a more scalable solution that would not rely so much on memory and enable the company to keep growing. The Nubank Authorizer team chose CockroachDB due to its ultra-resilience, simple scalability, strong consistency, and easy maintenance.

Retailers are increasingly adopting cloud applications and architectures to compete with giants like Amazon. Cloud platforms offer modern infrastructure that can manage data and transactions at any scale while supporting application development. The key is developing applications that reflect the cloud's modular and distributed architecture, often requiring re-architecting existing applications into containerized microservices orchestrated by Kubernetes. This allows retailers to integrate their retail sales platforms with centralized business processes and choose from a robust marketplace of cloud-based services. Additionally, adopting a distributed SQL database like CockroachDB can provide consistency, reliability, performance, and scale necessary for maintaining customer experiences and integrating systems.

This post provides a step-by-step guide on how to encrypt specific database tables with CockroachDB. The process involves creating an encryption key, starting a CockroachDB cluster with encrypted and unencrypted stores, creating PII and non-PII tables, assigning them to the corresponding stores, and verifying that the encryption is set up correctly. This approach allows for selective encryption of sensitive data while storing other data in plaintext, providing a balance between security and performance.

Optimal Systems, a company that started by archiving satellite photos for the European Space Agency, has grown significantly over the years and needed to modernize its infrastructure. The company's CTO, Nikola Milanovic, sought a solution with infinite cloud scaling, high availability, high fault tolerance, Postgres compatibility, and no dependency on Windows or any other proprietary software. Optimal Systems chose CockroachDB as it met all their requirements. They built a new storage product called yuuvis®, which includes AI-driven character recognition services to make documents searchable. The company is now working towards hosting 11 billion completely searchable documents using its CockroachDB and Elasticsearch-powered system.

CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database, has made significant changes to simplify multi-region configuration. Users can now think of multi-region databases and tables in three ways: the regions in which the database should reside, the survivability goal of the database, and the latency requirements for each table. The new abstractions allow users to specify a survival goal for the database, in terms they'd understand, and dramatically simplify the configuration of tables to achieve latency goals. This includes automatic creation of zone configurations with at least 3 replicas spread out amongst the available regions defined in the database, and the ability to upgrade to REGION survivability which creates five replicas for greater fault tolerance. Additionally, users can specify low-latency access by table using three new locality configurations: REGIONAL BY TABLE, REGIONAL BY ROW, and GLOBAL.

The CockroachDB Dedicated team built a centralized logging system for their distributed database using Splunk. They chose Splunk over ELK and building an in-house solution due to its security features, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. The system aggregates logs from both application containers running in Kubernetes and cloud providers like AWS and GCP. By shipping thousands of logs to longterm searchable storage, the team can now alert on various event types and improve their overall security infrastructure.

Cockroach Labs has appointed Lorenzo Montesi as its new Chief Financial Officer. Montesi brings over a decade of experience from top technology companies such as Cohesity, VMware, EMC and RSA. His appointment comes at an exciting time for the company, which recently raised $160 million in funding at a valuation of $2 billion. Cockroach Labs is experiencing rapid growth in the cloud data market with its product, CockroachDB, gaining significant traction among developers. Montesi will be responsible for driving financial planning, analysis and operations as the company scales globally during this period of significant growth.

RoacherPride is a group at Cockroach Labs that celebrates Pride year-round by creating an inclusive environment for members of the company's underrepresented backgrounds. The group aims to educate all employees on how to be allies and support the larger community. They offer various programming, such as safe space forums and mini-blog posts about influential figures in the history of the LBGTQIA+ community. Both members of the LBGTQIA+ community and allies are welcome to join RoacherPride.

CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database designed for multi-region deployment. It provides built-in support for global data distribution, enabling developers to easily create rows homed in different regions while still being accessible using familiar declarative SQL syntax. This feature, called REGIONAL BY ROW, allows users to specify the region where each row of data should be stored, making it easy to deploy a database across multiple regions and ensuring that data is always available even if entire regions fail. To demonstrate this capability, we can create a sample table with rows distributed across different regions using CockroachDB's SQL syntax. We will also configure the default region for each node in the cluster and enable locality optimized partitioned index scans to improve query performance. Here are some key points about REGIONAL BY ROW: 1. It is built into CockroachDB, making it easy to use without requiring additional configuration or tools. 2. Users can specify the region where each row of data should be stored using SQL syntax, allowing for fine-grained control over data distribution across regions. 3. Locality optimized partitioned index scans are enabled by default, which means that CockroachDB will automatically try to access data from the closest available node when executing queries, improving query performance and minimizing latency. 4. Data is always accessible even if entire regions fail, thanks to CockroachDB's distributed architecture and built-in replication features. 5. The ability to easily deploy a database across multiple regions can help organizations improve the availability and resilience of their applications while reducing costs associated with data storage and transfer. In summary, REGIONAL BY ROW is a powerful feature in CockroachDB that makes it easy for developers to create globally distributed databases with built-in support for multi-region deployment. By allowing users to specify the region where each row of data should be stored, this feature enables organizations to improve the availability and resilience of their applications while reducing costs associated with data storage and transfer.

Database outages can be costly for companies, resulting in lost revenue, damaged reputation, and lost time. Two major North American retailers experienced significant losses due to database outages. To prevent future outages, both companies switched to CockroachDB, a distributed cloud-neutral system that ensures high availability and resilience against node, region, or even cloud provider failures. By using CockroachDB, these companies were able to maintain their operations during unplanned outages and improve user experience with faster app load times.