June 2024 Summaries

This blog series explores how CockroachDB, a cloud-native distributed SQL database, can be used on Microsoft Azure to achieve unprecedented scalability, resilience, and performance for enterprise applications. It discusses the benefits of using CockroachDB on Azure, including its compatibility with Azure's infrastructure, deployment options, and integration with various Azure services such as VMs, Premium Storage, Blob Storage, KMS, AKS, and Synapse. The series also highlights several use cases for CockroachDB on Azure, including global scale applications, regulatory compliance, disaster recovery, modernizing legacy applications, multi-cloud strategies, financial services, and more. It provides a comprehensive guide to help organizations harness the full potential of CockroachDB on Azure and transform their data infrastructure.

When building a large-scale and highly available payments processing application or service, what exactly do you need from your database? This sounds like a simple question, yet it is far from simple to answer when we’re talking about the data backbone for an enterprise-scale application that may need to handle hundreds of thousands of requests per second. A critical payments functionality needs to work correctly, even if other parts of the system go down, and every penny of every transaction must always be correct and instantly accounted for. The database also needs to scale out smoothly to keep pace with growing workloads. However, traditional SQL databases are reliable but complex and expensive to scale, while NoSQL databases provide strong consistency and ACID transactions, but fail to deliver scalability and high availability. Distributed SQL databases evolved to solve both scalability and consistency in a single database, providing powerful payments architectures that can handle high availability, geo-distribution, resilience, and consistency. When evaluating distributed SQL solutions for payment processing, it is essential to look for criteria such as high availability, strong consistency, scalability, disaster recovery, data geo-partitioning, and cloud agnosticism. A highly available database reduces downtime to the minimum by providing redundancy and failover mechanisms, ensuring that the system remains operational even if one or more components fail. Strong consistency ensures accurate recording and storage of every transaction, while scalability allows the database to handle increased traffic and maintain consistent performance. Disaster recovery features ensure quick data recovery in the event of a disaster, while data geo-partitioning makes it simple to comply with regulatory requirements. A truly multi-cloud database can operate single or multiple clusters that span multiple cloud providers while allowing your application to treat it like a single-instance database operating on a single cloud. The payment processing industry has become critical to the global economy, and choosing a highly-available distributed SQL database is essential for delivering secure and always-available payment experiences.

RoachFest 2024 is a major event for application owners, data architects, database administrators, engineers, and operators, marking the first-ever UK edition of Cockroach Labs' leading event. The second of three events, it will take place in London on June 27th, featuring expert speaker tracks, breakout sessions, networking opportunities, and a cocktail hour. Rob Reid, Technical Evangelist for Cockroach Labs, previews what's new at RoachFest 2024, highlighting the importance of distributed SQL databases, regulatory compliance, data sovereignty, and scalability. The event aims to create an ecosystem of learning, where attendees can learn from each other and share knowledge. With a focus on scaling distributed SQL, multi-cloud strategies, and more, RoachFest 2024 promises to deliver fresh insights and new experiences for attendees.

This article explains how to integrate CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database, with AWS Redshift, a leading data warehousing solution by Amazon Web Services, to analyze data and develop insights that are critical for developing cloud-native data pipelines. The integration uses Amazon S3 as an intermediary storage service to unlock powerful data workflows, enhance analytical capabilities, and drive actionable insights. By leveraging CDC (Change Data Capture) technology, the integration ensures real-time analytics, reporting, and business intelligence on current transactional data while maintaining data integrity across systems. This setup enables businesses to deliver personalized attention and immediate service, enhancing the overall customer experience. The process involves setting up a CockroachDB cluster on AWS, configuring it for CDC, creating a database and table, setting up an S3 bucket as the cloud storage sink, setting up an AWS Redshift cluster, creating a changefeed for the CockroachDB table, and continuous data loading between S3 and Redshift.

The concept of high availability in databases refers to the ability of a system to remain operational and accessible even in the event of hardware or software failures, network outages, or other disruptions. A highly available database ensures that transactions can be processed and recorded reliably without interruption or data loss. However, when evaluating a database's reliability claims, it is essential to understand exactly what their version of high availability really means in the context of your specific use case and business needs. Many databases claim to offer high availability but do not provide transparent SLAs (service level agreements) that define the level of service they guarantee to supply at all times. A database's 100% uptime guarantee is often misleading, as it may only refund a percentage of the monthly bill in the event of downtime. Instead, look for databases with four nines of uptime (99.99%) or higher, which translates to less than one minute of downtime per year. Among distributed SQL databases, CockroachDB offers 99.999% uptime (5 minutes and 18 seconds per year) without an asterisk, making it a suitable option for mission-critical systems powering payments and always-accurate payment experiences.

The growing number of enterprises are moving past mainframes due to the agility and scalability of cloud architectures, which provide faster time-to-market, improved security, and reduced business risks. Cockroach Labs' partnership with mLogica offers a solution to modernize legacy systems, reducing costs, complexity, and time-to-value. The collaboration enables enterprises to migrate to a modern PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database, with portability across the cloud, multi-cloud, and on-premises environments. With high processing power and proven track record, mainframe-based enterprises are starting to see the benefits of cloud-native architectures, delivering always-on customer experiences, scaling effortlessly to meet demand, and expanding easily to new geographies.

Cockroach Labs engineers have made a significant contribution to the academic community with their new paper, "The Price of Privacy: A Performance Study of Confidential Virtual Machines for Database Systems", which explores tradeoffs and optimizations when running CockroachDB in a confidential computing environment. The paper was authored by Lina Qiu and co-authored by several experienced Cockroach Labs engineers, including Rebecca Taft and Alex Shraer. This new paper has been accepted to the 20th Anniversary DaMoN workshop, where it will be presented on June 10th in Santiago, Chile. As a sponsor of the 2024 SIGMOD conference, Cockroach Labs staff will exhibit throughout the show, offering an opportunity for attendees to learn more about their work and products.

Cockroach Labs will host its annual user conference, RoachFest 2024, with events in three cities: San Francisco, London, and New York City. The event aims to bring together application owners, data architects, database administrators, engineers, and operators to share knowledge, insights, and experiences with CockroachDB. Chris Casano, Director of Customer Engineering Americas for Cockroach Labs, emphasizes the importance of meeting customers, learning from their success stories, and gaining insights into modernizing architecture, consolidating databases, expanding businesses, and addressing application challenges. The event will feature expert speaker tracks, breakout sessions, networking opportunities, and a cocktail hour, with a focus on speed and time-to-market, as well as the database's role in achieving business goals. Attendees can expect to learn from customers, product owners, and experts, and build relationships that can lead to progress and knowledge gain.