April 2025 Summaries

SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) users are facing uncertainty due to the lack of a clear roadmap for version 17 and SAP's slow pace of modernization. The platform is aging, with version 16.1 launched over a decade after ASE 16.0, and its subscription model rollout has been the only update. This has raised concerns about security vulnerabilities, potential compliance violations, and rising maintenance costs once official support disappears. However, Sybase-dependent enterprises can leverage CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database that combines consistency, scalability, and simplicity, to power always-on applications running in the cloud, on-premises, or hybrid. CockroachDB offers a compelling way forward by addressing the core limitations of Sybase, particularly around scalability, availability, and regulatory compliance. Partnering with enterprise modernization experts like mLogica can provide critical value, bringing deep domain knowledge and proven methodologies to large-scale transformations. The partnership enables organizations to re-imagine how data serves the business, eliminating painful capacity planning cycles and ensuring business continuity and customer trust.

The Resilience Roadshow: Unlocking Operational Continuity with AWS & CockroachDB is a series of hands-on events designed for IT leaders, architects, and engineers to build resilient systems. The event features guided resiliency workshops, user journeys, AWS joint sessions, practical strategies panels, and moderated panel discussions. It aims to help attendees build failure-resistant apps at scale and gain practical skills in building compliant, performant, and available systems. The tour will visit New York City, Santa Clara, CA, and Chicago this May 2025, with limited spots available in each city due to the popularity of the Dallas event.

CockroachDB is a distributed SQL architecture designed to eliminate operational overhead while preserving familiarity with SQL and PostgreSQL. It provides consistent data across the globe, automatic scale and resiliency, reduced operational overhead, online schema changes, and localized data for performance and compliance. By adopting CockroachDB, retailers can reduce total cost of ownership, increase developer velocity, and gain peace of mind against data loss, downtime, and dev gridlock. The company's experience with shifting from MySQL to CockroachDB resulted in a $700,000 savings in the first year, amounting to a 149% return on investment.

To get the most out of your distributed SQL database, design schemas that distribute data evenly across ranges to impact performance and scalability. Use partial indexes to ensure only data being filtered for is indexed, create composite indexes for multi-column filtering and sorting, and monitor index usage and prune redundant or unused indexes regularly. Embrace transaction retries gracefully by using built-in retry logic in client libraries, reducing transaction time, and preemptively locking rows with `SELECT FOR UPDATE`. Understand how queries are executed to optimize them by using `EXPLAIN ANALYZE (DISTSQL)`, identifying expensive operations, and optimizing joins. Minimize latency with multi-region optimization by pinning data to a user's region, setting survival goals based on availability needs, and using super regions for data sovereignty and compliance. Automate backups and disaster recovery by distributing backups across regions or clouds, testing restore workflows regularly, and validating RTO/RPO assumptions. Finally, keep your cluster healthy by ensuring even load distribution, planning ahead, monitoring range distribution, and prioritizing important workloads during spikes.

Clock synchronization is a critical challenge in distributed systems like CockroachDB, which use the Network Time Protocol (NTP) along with software-based compensation techniques to achieve reliable time coordination across database nodes. Good timekeeping is essential for maintaining ACID guarantees and preventing stale reads. Clock skew between cluster VMs can impact SQL workload response times, generally degrading query performance as larger skews occur. CockroachDB relies on the clocks of all its VMs being within a configurable maximum offset from each other to provide non-stale reads. The max-offset value determines the uncertainty interval for reading transactions and influences the probability of contention, with smaller values leading to more retries. Time smoothing of leap seconds is crucial, particularly in regions where NTP sources implement smearing or slewing. Live VM migrations can support two operational tasks: runtime VM load optimization and memory-preserving maintenance, but require uninterrupted clock continuity to guarantee transactional consistency. CockroachDB operators must develop custom procedures for handling planned maintenance events, including disabling live migrations when uninterrupted clock is not available, and manually triggering VM maintenance after stopping nodes. Precise clock management is a foundational requirement for maintaining the correctness, performance, and reliability of CockroachDB in distributed environments. By following best practices outlined in this article, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of transaction retries, node instability, and stale reads, resulting in a more resilient and performant deployment.

RoachFest 2025 is an annual database conference hosted by Cockroach Labs, honoring stories of engineering under pressure and providing space for enthusiasts and experts to share their experiences. The event will focus on "Performance Under Adversity," exploring the real-world kind that defines the difference between being just available and truly resilient. The conference will feature customer stories, hands-on workshops, and expert-led sessions covering topics such as operational resilience, real-world lessons at scale, and why a distributed SQL conference should matter to everyone. With a focus on shared learning, getting candid and technical with experts, and building systems that can handle anything the world throws at them, RoachFest is your gateway to the future of distributed SQL databases.

The event "Unlocking Capital Markets Innovation" brought together financial services technology leaders, data professionals, and innovators to discuss the intersection of capital markets innovation and resilience. CockroachDB's native vector search capability was highlighted as a key technology for powering AI workloads at scale without sacrificing reliability. Operational resilience is now a strategic priority, with distributed SQL being recognized as essential to capital markets modernization. The conversation also emphasized the importance of resilient cloud-native infrastructure in helping financial institutions modernize their data infrastructure with confidence.

A sudden spike in user activity can be disastrous for retailers, potentially leading to downtime or slow performance that kills conversions. Traditional scaling methods such as over-provisioning resources or sharding databases are often operationally brittle and can still result in hotspots or failures. In contrast, distributed SQL databases like CockroachDB offer elastic scaling capabilities, high availability, low latency, and strong consistency, making them ideal for retailers facing traffic spikes. By building an infrastructure that doesn't just survive the spike but thrives in it, retailers can ensure seamless customer experiences and maintain profitability. As spiky workloads become increasingly common, retailers are future-proofing their stack with CockroachDB to stay resilient and competitive.

CockroachDB, a cloud-native database designed to scale globally and thrive in any environment, has announced the appointment of Sailesh Munagala as its new Chief Financial Officer. Sailesh brings a unique blend of financial expertise and operational experience from his previous roles at Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, and Vectra AI. The company's success over the past decade is marked by significant growth in enterprise customer adoption, revenue, and cloud momentum, with 200% year-over-year increases in new customer lands and 80% year-over-year growth in ARR. With Sailesh on board, CockroachDB aims to support its customers as they build for a future defined by resilience, scale, and continuous availability. The company is now poised to drive the next wave of innovation with high-growth technology companies like CockroachDB.

The Use Case Café event hosted by Cockroach Labs on March 25, 2025, highlighted the intersection of FinTech and modern payment systems. Shannon Dew and Scott Traver discussed the importance of strong security and compliance, maximum resilience and minimum downtime, ability to scale transactions effortlessly, and ensuring consistent and correct data everywhere in modern payment systems. They introduced CockroachDB as a streamlined solution that can handle data more efficiently by strategically placing it where it's needed most. Spreedly, a global payments orchestration platform, has successfully migrated to CockroachDB, showcasing its benefits in handling 93 million revenue transactions per month with high security, performance, and uptime standards. The event provided valuable insights into how CockroachDB supports Spreedly's payment orchestration platform, highlighting features like table locality, regional by row tables, and global tables that ensure data accuracy and efficiency.

Qoria, a global edtech leader, has adopted CockroachDB as its distributed SQL database to power its unified platform bringing together schools, families, and communities. The company's mission to protect children online requires real-time access to accurate user, classroom, and school directory information, which is vital for monitoring student online behavior, enforcing filtering policies, and powering parent notifications. Qoria's original PostgreSQL deployment struggled to keep up with the growing demand, leading to performance bottlenecks and availability concerns. After evaluating several options, including Google Spanner, CockroachDB emerged as the best fit for their needs, prioritizing 24/7 availability, horizontal scaling, strong consistency, ACID transactions, elasticity, and low total cost of ownership. Qoria built a new platform service from scratch using CockroachDB and Go, hosted on Google Kubernetes Engine, which simplifies its architecture and improves local development experience. With CockroachDB's resilient architecture, Qoria can ensure its systems remain always available, even as demand surges. The company is now exploring ways to further reduce latency across regions and evaluating the Standard Tier clusters more broadly as a cost-optimization strategy, with plans to leverage CockroachDB's multi-region clustering and AI-supporting features like semantic search to drive better user experiences.

CockroachDB provides mechanisms to recover data quickly and minimize Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) in the face of even catastrophic cluster failures. The database offers three key disaster recovery capabilities: backups, physical cluster replication, and logical cluster replication. Backups enable point-in-time recovery and allow restoration of data even if the original cluster is lost. Physical cluster replication replicates entire clusters across geographic locations at the disk level, allowing for region resiliency with a two data-center deployment and near-instant failover. Logical cluster replication allows replication of tables to another CockroachDB cluster, ideal for multi-cloud or hybrid setups. By leveraging these advanced features, organizations can build applications and databases that are not only high performing but also resilient in the face of real-world challenges.

Rob Reid, a London native and software developer, has become a prominent figure in the Cockroach Labs community. He started his career as a customer of the company's distributed SQL database, CockroachDB, in 2016, and quickly fell in love with its ease of use and power. After writing his first book on CockroachDB, "The Practical Guide to CockroachDB: Building Fault-Tolerant Distributed Systems," Reid was hired by the company as a technical evangelist. He has since become one of the faces of Cockroach Labs, creating content for the company's YouTube channel and leading events like RoachFest London. The new edition of Reid's book, "CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition," is now available, featuring updates on new features such as vectors, super regions, and logical data replication. Reid shares his passion for CockroachDB with developers, architects, operators, DBAs, and anyone looking to build applications with an elastic, distributed SQL database built for the cloud. He emphasizes the importance of thinking bigger than current limitations and getting hands-on experience with the product. With its high availability, low latency, and scalability, CockroachDB has become a leading database company, powering business-critical use-cases at enterprises across various industries.

You can back up your CockroachDB cluster using either manual methods or automated external connections. For manual backups, you can use AWS CLI to store your data in a secure location such as Amazon S3. This approach requires managing credentials and setting environment variables. Alternatively, CockroachDB supports customer-managed backups using S3, which allows for more control over the backup process. When choosing between these methods, consider using external connections for abstraction and ease, while specified authentication provides full control over the backup process. Additionally, you can use implicit authentication with IAM roles to automatically authenticate your backups on AWS EC2 instances. Both manual and automated approaches have their place depending on your needs, ensuring that your data remains safe, accessible, and well-organized.

CockroachDB is a horizontally and vertically scalable SQL database that ensures continuous access to data even in the face of hardware failures, network issues, or regional outages. It provides operational excellence through automated operations like sharding, rebalancing, backups, and rolling upgrades, reducing manual effort and minimizing downtime. The database delivers security with encryption by default for data at rest and in transit, role-based access control (RBAC), and audit logging to meet stringent compliance requirements. For resilience, its distributed SQL architecture ensures fault tolerance and continuous availability through automated replication and failover, even across multi-region deployments. CockroachDB achieves performance with intelligent query optimization, efficient indexing strategies, and geo-partitioning to minimize latency and ensure fast, consistent access to data globally. It also optimizes costs by leveraging commodity hardware, elastic scalability, and automated operations to align infrastructure costs with demand, ensuring efficiency without compromising performance or reliability.

MOLT Verify is a data validation tool designed by Cockroach Labs to ensure the accuracy of database migrations. It compares a source database against a target CockroachDB cluster at multiple levels, including schema and row-level data validation. The tool performs checks such as table verification, column definition verification, and row data verification to catch any discrepancies. MOLT Verify supports verifying data from PostgreSQL or MySQL sources against a CockroachDB cluster and is provided as a standalone CLI tool. It offers key benefits like reducing the risk of data corruption, providing faster automated data validation, and validating beyond row counts. The tool's architecture integrates with CockroachDB and source databases using standard database connections, abstraction layers, and schema mapping assumptions. MOLT Verify acts as a safety net in the migration workflow, dramatically reducing the risk of data corruption or loss during large-scale migrations. To use MOLT Verify effectively, consider running verification at key points in the migration, minimizing changes for the final verification, tuning concurrency and batching, and using best practices like continuous replication and filtering out false mismatches.

Retailers are modernizing their infrastructure by adopting distributed SQL databases to meet the demands of high traffic spikes, scalability, real-time inventory accuracy, and personalized experiences. Companies like Cockroach Labs have worked with numerous retailers, including Fortune 50 companies, to implement CockroachDB in production. Retailers face challenges such as inventory management, payment systems, and scalable eCommerce platforms, which can lead to slow checkouts, stock inaccuracies, and website downtime. By leveraging CockroachDB's built-in changefeeds, out-of-the-box availability features, and performance at scale capabilities, retailers can address these challenges and ensure a seamless customer experience.