December 2021 Summaries

Star Trek: The Next Generation, while not a series about databases, offers modern developers valuable lessons through creative interpretation of its episodes. Key takeaways for database management include the importance of speed to prevent user frustration, the benefits of distributed systems to ensure data resilience, and the necessity of ACID transactional guarantees for handling concurrent transactions accurately. The series underscores the value of choosing reputable sources for advice, maintaining data correctness under pressure, and preparing for inevitable system failures by utilizing distributed and multi-cloud solutions. Moreover, the narrative encourages developers to focus on creative innovation rather than getting bogged down in technical details, highlighting tools like CockroachDB Serverless that facilitate this by enabling the building of world-scale applications with less operational overhead. While the parallels drawn from Star Trek require imagination, they effectively reinforce essential database management principles.

Cockroach Labs has been included in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS) by Gartner, marking a significant milestone. The company's CockroachDB cloud DBMS is designed for transactional use cases and distributed systems. This year, only 20 vendors made it onto the Magic Quadrant, which evaluates market momentum, capabilities, and customer reviews. CockroachDB was rated high for consistency and multicloud/hybrid deployment capabilities. The company's vision is to create a cloud-native DBMS that elastically scales based on usage, integrates with other data architectures, and offers SQL compatibility.

In 2021, Kubernetes became mainstream with 94% of survey participants running it in production. Serverless technology survived its journey through the Trough of Disillusionment phase and is predicted to reach critical mass in 2022, approaching mainstream acceptance as the best practice model for software development. Developers are expected to gain decision-maker status in large and/or traditional waterfall companies due to serverless's ability to accelerate innovation and agility. Additionally, serverless relational databases-as-a-service will accelerate transactional data's move to the cloud as more organizations adopt service-based OLTP database offerings.

Cockroach Labs, a company that provides next-generation open source databases, has recently raised significant capital at a $5 billion valuation. Founded by a team of software engineers who were frustrated with the lack of sophisticated database technology in the open source ecosystem, Cockroach Labs aims to build operational databases that are resilient to cloud outages and can accommodate massive growth in data intensity from globally dispersed customers. The company's latest product, CockroachDB Serverless, is a truly serverless relational database designed to scale globally with costs that exactly match usage. This funding round will allow the company to accelerate its investment in R&D and continue innovating towards its vision of enabling every developer who can build an application to also launch that application themselves using a truly "serverless" technology stack.

Jen Murphy is a Channel Sales Leader at Cockroach Labs. She has over 25 years of experience in the software industry, primarily focusing on building indirect channels to help companies grow sales and drive validation through strategic partnerships. Jen chose to work at Cockroach Labs due to its technology and team culture. In her role, she is responsible for defining and building the company's partner ecosystem strategy as part of the Revenue organization. She advises people starting their careers in sales to be patient, ask questions, listen, and embrace opportunities outside their comfort zone. The Revenue team at Cockroach Labs embodies a "One Team" culture, working together to ensure customer success.

Micro betting is a form of live betting that allows users to bet on the outcomes of specific events during games. It's most commonly seen in sports betting apps, where users can bet on the results of in-game events such as pitches in baseball or goals in soccer. Implementing live betting presents significant technical challenges, including minimizing latency, scaling to handle sudden loads, avoiding downtime and data loss, ensuring transaction order correctness, and maintaining data consistency and accuracy. Traditional SQL databases offer strong data accuracy and integrity but are not built for distributed computing or serving global markets. NoSQL databases provide easier scalability but often require compromises in terms of consistency. Distributed SQL databases combine the strengths of both traditional SQL and NoSQL databases, offering familiarity, consistency guarantees, and elastic scalability.

Online gambling is one of the fastest-growing industries with a market size expected to reach $127 billion by 2027. However, it presents unique challenges for app development due to users' high performance expectations and sensitivity to outages. To succeed in this competitive environment, gambling apps need to offer high availability and high performance while also innovating quickly. The database plays a crucial role in achieving these objectives as it directly impacts the user experience and can save or lose significant time for developers. CockroachDB Serverless offers an ideal solution for gambling app developers by providing high availability, high performance, and best-in-class ease of use. Its distributed SQL design allows developers to focus on feature development while ensuring scalability and automatic data replication. Additionally, CockroachDB Dedicated supports multi-region deployments and data geo-partitioning, making it easier for gambling apps to provide a great experience to users worldwide and comply with regional regulations.

This article discusses multi-cloud deployment with CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database designed to survive data center failures and network issues. The author explains the importance of multi-cloud databases in minimizing latency while ensuring availability, using an example scenario where an application receives most of its traffic from the east coast of the United States. The article then provides a step-by-step tutorial on creating a cross-cloud CockroachDB cluster with nodes in three data centers along the eastern seaboard. It covers launching VMs, installing and booting CockroachDB, inserting data into the cluster, simulating data center failure, and concludes by highlighting how multi-cloud support can provide operational flexibility. The author also mentions that most cloud providers charge an egress bandwidth fee for network traffic leaving the data center, which should be considered before launching a multi-cloud cluster.

The blog post discusses the development of an automated alert and aggregation rule generation framework for CockroachDB metrics. Currently, CockroachDB outputs multiple metrics that indicate system health, but lacks a framework to provide additional information on how these metrics should be consumed and used for monitoring and debugging. The new framework will enable engineers to specify alerting and aggregation rules for metrics using PromQL syntax, which can be easily imported for usage in alerting/monitoring configurations. The framework aims to bridge the knowledge gap between metric implementation and usage by providing a mechanism for engineers to share more information on how to use the metric. Future work includes extending this framework to include support for generating automated Grafana dashboards for CockroachDB metrics.

TreesPlease Games, a startup focused on creating meaningful games that make players feel good about their time spent in the game, is using CockroachDB Serverless for its gaming infrastructure. The company's first free-to-play puzzle aims to restore forests and rescue animals, with an ethical angle for casual games. TreesPlease Games chose CockroachDB due to its distributed SQL database capabilities, compatibility with Postgres-wire, and cloud-agnostic nature. The combination of Unity (game engine), HeroicLabs' Nakama (game server), and CockroachDB Serverless allows the company to develop their first game quickly while keeping costs low and preparing for easy scaling as they onboard users.

Richard Cai shares his experience of growth as a software engineer at Cockroach Labs. He highlights the benefits of Flex Fridays, which allow employees to work on personal projects or take time off for relaxation. Additionally, he mentions the Learning is Good budget that provides $2500 annually for employee learning and development. Cai plans to use this budget to pursue an online master's degree in computer science at Georgia Tech. He emphasizes that Cockroach Labs is a great company for continuous learning and encourages readers to explore their open roles.