August 2024 Summaries

The text discusses the migration process of Superbet, a sports betting platform operating across Europe that has scaled to over $1 billion in revenue. They successfully executed a multi-step migration from an on-prem NoSQL database to on-prem CockroachDB and then to CockroachDB self-hosted on AWS. The key reasons for choosing CockroachDB included data integrity, scalability, and cloud agnosticism. Superbet is now exploring multi-tenancy as they continue to grow their business.

Nellis Auction, an online auction company specializing in reverse logistics, faced scalability and service distribution challenges due to rapid growth. They migrated their legacy MySQL 5.7 database to Cloud SQL on Google Cloud but needed a more robust data solution. CockroachDB emerged as the best option for its native replication and redundancy capabilities, SQL compatibility, relational transactional isolation, open-source nature, industry experience, specialized support, and serverless offerings. Nellis Auction's architecture now includes Google Cloud Run, CockroachDB, Google BigQuery, Google Datastream, Google Looker, Google Pub/Sub, CockroachDB Changefeeds, Google MemoryStore, and Temporal to ensure a reliable, scalable, and modern data solution.

User-defined functions (UDFs) and stored procedures (SPs) are essential components of database systems, allowing users to define complex queries that can be executed with minimal input parameters. CockroachDB supports UDFs and SPs in SQL and PLpg/SQL languages for better performance and reduced errors. The blog post delves into the technical aspects of implementing these features in CockroachDB, including volatility options, routine implementation, handling multiple updates to a single table, and integrating PL/pgSQL with a SQL execution engine. It also discusses future work on increasing compatibility between CockroachDB and Postgres while optimizing efficiency.

Cockroach Labs and PwC UK have announced a strategic collaboration aimed at providing comprehensive solutions for financial institutions facing challenges in mainframe modernization, regulatory compliance, and evolving technology needs. The partnership combines CockroachDB's distributed SQL database with PwC UK's expertise in professional services to address operational resilience, data sovereignty compliance, and legacy mainframe modernization for the financial sector. This collaboration aims to help global enterprises accelerate time-to-value in their compliance and modernization initiatives while reducing risks, costs, and complexity associated with regulatory compliance and mainframe modernization.

CockroachDB is a SQL database with a distributed cloud native architecture that offers high availability, scalability, and strong consistency. Deploying CockroachDB on Microsoft Azure allows you to leverage Azure's robust cloud infrastructure to build resilient and scalable applications. The deployment options for CockroachDB on Azure include self-hosted on Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), self-hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for containerized environments, and dedicated services that take care of the operational aspects of running CockroachDB. Single-region and multi-region deployments are also available, with benefits including simplicity, cost-effectiveness, reduced latency, regulatory compliance, and scalability. Deploying CockroachDB on Azure allows seamless integration with Azure's extensive ecosystem, providing advantages such as scalability, security, and integration with other Azure services like Azure Blob Storage, Azure Monitor, and Azure Active Directory. The process of setting up CockroachDB on Azure involves creating a resource group, VMs, load balancer, and configuring the database, or using AKS for containerized deployments, or provisioning a dedicated cluster on Azure Cloud Console. Each deployment strategy offers unique benefits and considerations, enabling you to choose the best fit for your organizational needs and application requirements.

CockroachDB has helped Rightmove, the #1 property website in the UK, achieve its goals by providing a highly available and performant database solution that reduced overhead and complexity. The company was looking for a database to future proof their platform capabilities and increase innovation and business agility. With CockroachDB, Rightmove is able to manage large amounts of structured and semi-structured data, migrate from Oracle with minimal impact, and now focus on other business needs. Additionally, the team is exploring opportunities to leverage generative AI in their products, which could lead to exciting new developments in the coming years.

In the past decade, we've helped our customers push the envelope to lead in their respective markets with data architectures that can survive node outages, datacenter outages, regional cloud outages, and even turning off a cloud vendor entirely with complete business continuity. We are agnostic to public vs private cloud, allowing zero-downtime portability, and public / private hybrid deployments. Our ability to meet these challenges has made CockroachDB the trusted global database for running mission-critical workloads of the world's most important businesses. From the beginning, CockroachDB was released as software that customers can run themselves in two flavors: a free Core version and an Enterprise version for scaled businesses with mission-critical applications. Over time, extensive use of both offerings has allowed for CockroachDB's rapid evolution. Two trends have emerged - startups using Enterprise features not available in Core, and scaled businesses compromising on using the full capabilities of CockroachDB by eschewing the Enterprise license for free usage of Core. Consequently, we are introducing a new licensing model that provides all users with the full breadth of CockroachDB capabilities, allowing individuals and small businesses to use Enterprise for free, encouraging fair exchange of value with scaled businesses, keeping our code source available, and retiring the Core offering. We will introduce a new Enterprise licensing structure for self-hosted users, providing robust database capabilities. Additionally, we are introducing 30-day Trial and Free license tiers.

CockroachDB Cloud is now available on AWS Marketplace with a new pay-as-you-go payment option, allowing users to benefit from a streamlined payment process through their AWS accounts and gain an additional option to acquire Cockroach Cloud alongside the existing private offer. This new model aligns perfectly with the flexible, usage-based pricing inherent to CockroachDB Cloud, making it easier for customers to experience its benefits without long-term financial commitments. The pay-as-you-go model offers enhanced flexibility and usage, a simplified sign-up process, and seamless billing integration, allowing users to link their CockroachDB Cloud organization directly to their AWS billing account for consolidated payments. This transition is part of Cockroach Labs' broader initiative to enhance the customer experience and address feedback from users, as they look forward to collaborating with AWS in future endeavors.

RoachFest is a conference series focused on resilience and scalability, targeting application owners, data architects, and database administrators. The event features presentations, demonstrations, breakout sessions, and networking opportunities, with expert speakers from companies like Microsoft, Global Payments, and Mythical Games. Chris Casano, Senior Director of Customer Engineering for the Americas at Cockroach Labs, will be the Master of Ceremonies for the New York City stop, where attendees can learn about mission-critical systems, collaborate on common problems, and network with peers. The event is scheduled to take place in NYC on September 26, 2024.

RoachFest24 is a series of presentations by CockroachDB customers, and the second event featured Devsisters' Lead DevOps Engineer ChangWon Lee sharing his knowledge on using CockroachDB for their popular CookieRun mobile game franchise. Devsisters needed a database that could handle high availability, resiliency at scale, and frequent changes to schema, which CockroachDB provided with its horizontal scalability, transactional support, guaranteed consistency, and support for changing schemas. Lee showcased how easily CockroachDB fit into their Kubernetes setup and successfully implemented it in several games, including CookieRun: Kingdom, Witch's Castle, and Tower of Adventures. He emphasized the importance of simple solutions using cloud-native infrastructure to ensure collaboration with other teams.