April 2021 Summaries

CockroachDB, a reliable, open-source relational database, has introduced support for spatial data types in its latest version. This feature allows developers to store and access common relational data types (e.g., INT, TEXT, UUID) alongside GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY spatial data types. The new release includes access to spatial data types, indexing for fast reads, external formats such as GeoJSON and Well Known Text, common spatial shapes like linestrings and polygons, and built-in functions like ST_DWithin and ST_Contains. CockroachDB aims for compatibility with PostGIS, allowing developers to seamlessly migrate existing applications while leveraging the rich third-party ecosystem. This feature enables users to build applications that require information related to physical locations, such as location data and mapping questions. CockroachDB provides a horizontally scalable implementation of spatial data, ensuring accuracy, reliability, and scale without compromising on data consistency or availability.

Modern fintech apps like Betterment and Robinhood push the limits of what consumers expect from banking apps. One of their biggest competitive advantages is that they can support real-time decision-making and transaction processing, providing users with instant decisions, personalized experiences, and feature-rich applications. To keep up, banks and financial services organizations need to embrace digital transformations that enable them to innovate around transaction services. These services can include dynamic pricing, hyper-personalized content, real-time business process optimization, and fraud detection. Financial services organizations have a wealth of transaction data. By finding an efficient way to gather, store, automate, and analyze this data, they can gain invaluable customer insights and build solutions that are miles ahead of the competition. This is where cloud-native infrastructures come in – making data more accessible and providing timely insights to enable automation and guide informed decision-making. Banks need to adopt these modern, cloud-native data platforms, replacing the likes of Oracle, IBM DB2, NoSQL, and other legacy systems. Cloud-native = containers + microservices. Another key benefit of cloud-native architecture for financial services organizations is that applications are distributed and made up of loosely coupled microservices. This provides low latency, even when operating at high-volumes, by moving the data closer to the source. Distributed applications also provide better uptime since data stored in a centralized location is vulnerable to outages or attacks and makes it easier for banks to add new state-of-the-art capabilities and services.  By building a cloud-native infrastructure, financial services organizations can create a dynamic environment composed of independent processes that all work together seamlessly and make it easy to add new features. Beyond transaction services, cloud-native architectures are driving innovation in areas like data science, IoT, and edge computing. What to look for in your cloud-native database: performance, flexibility, scale, and Kubernetes. Banks and financial services organizations have found, however, that moving to a cloud-native architecture can introduce new challenges. Legacy data platforms were not designed to handle the complexity of distributed environments or large numbers of services and often break down when stretched. To fill this gap, financial services organizations should adopt a flexible database solution that provides easy access to the transaction data needed to add new innovative and personalized services. It should be for the cloud built from the ground up to take advantage of the scale and resilience yet capable of being deployed on-premises or across hybrid or multi-cloud environments. It should also be easy to add new nodes for scale and automatically rebalance and replicate data throughout a distrusted system. Some of the critical database features that financial organizations should look for include: ACID compliance and consistent transactions, Built for Kubernetes, Compatibility, Support for multi-national customers. By combining these features, banks and financial services organizations can quickly and efficiently create new transaction services and personalized features. One such database is CockroachDB, the cloud-native, distributed SQL database that provides next-level consistency, ultra-resilience, data locality, and massive scale to modern cloud applications.

Cockroach University offers a free course, "CockroachDB Query Performance for Developers," designed to help developers improve their applications' query performance and functionality. The self-paced course covers topics such as analyzing query execution plans, adding indexes, optimizing sorting performance, and efficiently querying fields in JSON records. It includes nine videos, eleven hands-on labs, and a final exam with a Certificate of Completion upon passing. This course is suitable for developers, database administrators, system architects, and others involved in the application development process.

Cockroach Labs has implemented various charitable giving initiatives that contribute to making it a great place to work. These include matching employee referral bonuses with donations to the employee's chosen charity, donating to organizations like Women Who Code and Black Girls Code through marketing campaigns, and organizing a Pay It Forward Committee where employees can nominate charities for donations. The company believes in giving back as a way of motivating its employees and aligning with their values.

Using the 1997 film "Titanic" as an allegory, the article creatively reimagines the Titanic disaster through the lens of modern technology, particularly Kubernetes and distributed databases. It compares the ill-fated ship to a single-instance database, highlighting its vulnerabilities and lack of disaster recovery capabilities, which led to its tragic sinking. The author proposes a scenario where the Titanic operates like a distributed system, with multiple ships, representing a distributed database, ensuring redundancy and fault tolerance. This setup would prevent a single point of failure, much like Kubernetes manages containerized applications across a cluster to ensure high availability and resilience. By likening characters Rose and Jack to Kubernetes and CockroachDB, the text illustrates the transformative potential of these technologies, suggesting that with distributed architecture, the original Titanic's catastrophe could have been avoided, allowing the story to end happily without loss of life.

Australian-based Birchal has created a crowdfunding platform on CockroachDB, providing startups and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) with an affordable and easy-to-use online mechanism for raising capital. The platform enables companies to engage with potential new stakeholders and raise money for their business while making it easy for investors to support the brands they love. Birchal's success in the Australian Crowd Source Funding industry is due to its mission to comply with complex regulations and develop a solution that simplifies the investment process. The platform, built on CockroachDB, has enabled Birchal to make informed decisions on future investing behaviors, providing them with a competitive edge.

In April 2021, Cockroach Labs published a revisited exploration of Go executable files. However, the article was perceived as incendiary and accusatory by readers, particularly developers on the Go team. The authors made mistakes in their analysis and defended incorrect conclusions for too long. They failed to adequately acknowledge their mistakes and disrespected the Go development team and broader community. Cockroach Labs removed the article from their site and apologized for not holding up their end of the agreement, promising to listen and do better.

Infinite Colors is an employee-driven initiative at Cockroach Labs that aims to raise awareness and share resources about the challenges and opportunities of neurodiversity in the workplace. Neurodiversity refers to variations in the human brain regarding sociability, learning, attention, mood, and other mental functions. The group supports its mission through dialogue, resources, and advocacy. Dialogue involves facilitating respectful conversation and lifting taboos around neuro-atypical traits and behaviors. Resources include a corporate library of guides and tips on various aspects related to workplace optimization for neurodiverse individuals. Advocacy is supported by executive sponsorship from the CTO and members with senior roles in the organization, leading to an impact on staff experience and organizational processes. Infinite Colors plans to share its mission and materials with more people in the future to encourage more neurodiverse folks to join them.

The blog post, written by Ali Ibrahim, explores the process of integrating CockroachDB with a Rails application, highlighting its similarities to PostgreSQL due to its use of the PostgreSQL wire protocol. It details the steps of configuring an existing Rails app, CodeTriage, to use CockroachDB by replacing the PostgreSQL adapter with the ActiveRecord CockroachDB Adapter. The author demonstrates how to install CockroachDB, configure it, and make necessary code changes, such as editing the Gemfile and database configuration files. During the setup, they encounter a compatibility issue due to unsupported PostgreSQL extensions, illustrating that while CockroachDB is similar to PostgreSQL, some differences necessitate adjustments. The post concludes by successfully connecting CodeTriage to CockroachDB, showcasing its functionality as an alternative to PostgreSQL in Rails applications, and encourages trying CockroachDB in other Rails projects.

Cockroach University offers free courses on Distributed SQL Tutorials & Labs for Beginners. The platform has received positive feedback and currently offers two new developer courses, hiring a full team of training professionals, and planning out a comprehensive roadmap for the future. Over 6,000 developers have enrolled in one or more Cockroach University classes. The university offers Introduction to CockroachDB and Distributed SQL course which is ideal for non-technical roles interested in learning distributed databases and CockroachDB concepts. Another hands-on course, Practical First Steps with CockroachDB, provides all the tools needed to get started with CockroachDB. Both courses are useful basics for developers and great training tools for managers. They each take around 1 hour - 90 minutes to complete and they are self-paced. After completing each course, you will receive a Certificate of Completion.

Infinite Colors is an employee resource group at Cockroach Labs that aims to raise awareness about neurodiversity in the workplace. Neurodiversity refers to variations in the human brain regarding sociability, learning, attention, mood and other mental functions. The group provides a safe space for employees to share their experiences and challenges related to neurodiversity, fostering recognition and accommodation for different ways of being human on the workplace. Infinite Colors also maintains a corporate library of resources that includes guides and tips on how to optimize one's workplace, develop positive work relationships, advocate for one's diversity, avoid burnout, and guide peers and managers towards understanding and accommodation. The group has received executive sponsorship from Peter Mattis, CTO of Cockroach Labs, and some of its members have senior roles in the organization.

The article highlights five beginner-friendly coding livestreams that viewers can follow to learn programming. These streams feature live learning of various tech stacks such as full-stack web development, Python, Golang, Rust, and Javascript. They are conducted by experienced developers who share their coding projects and help newbies understand the process better. The article also mentions two bonus streams that focus on 100 Days of Code journey and co-working stream for pomodoro coding sprints. These livestreams provide a great platform for beginners to learn programming in real-time, ask questions, and interact with fellow developers.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) can be optimized for workloads by using performance benchmarking tools like PerfKit Benchmarker, which measures end-to-end time to provision resources in the cloud. The tool reports on standard peak performance metrics such as latency, throughput, time-to-complete, and IOPS. Additionally, reading benchmarking research from Cockroach Labs can help users make informed decisions when choosing a cloud provider. Evaluating workloads before configuring GCP is also important, as default configurations may not be ideal for all types of machines or workloads.