Jargon

Cockroach Labs Tech words for non-tech people

Focusing here on those words you won't find otherwise explained on our blog. Why?

• you want to understand the chatter between devs
• you're an external contributor to CockroachDB and want to ensure you're not missing anything
• if you're just starting at Cockroach Labs
• if you've been at Cockroach Labs for a while but somehow you missed an explanation and you've never dared asking since then

If you wish to have some more words explained, just ask!

• Aphyr: the usual name Kyle Kingsbury goes by
• AWS (Amazon Web Services): Amazon's Cloud hosting
• Azure: Microsoft's Cloud hosting
• Bikeshed: many engineers spending a lot of time debating a minor issue - see the story here
• Blue: test cluster on Azure
• Cassandra: another DB product we hear about often
• Chaos: testing method that stops nodes in a test cluster unpredictably
• Chaos monkey: program that performs chaos testing
• CI (Continuous integration): program that runs tests and produces reports automatically in the background
• Code yellow: moving an issue to top company priority (idea comes from Google)
• Cutting the release: selecting one particular version of the product to publish out
• Data sovereignty: the demand for some apps/companies to have data located in specific places geographically, for example in EU data for citizens must be hosted in the EU
• Delta: test cluster on GCE
• Encryption at rest: have the data encrypted in the database, not only when queried by clients
• Gamma: test cluster on GCE
• GCE (Google Compute Engine): Google's Cloud hosting
• Git: a tool and database to store and share source code
• Jepsen: a tool that tests databases in a harsh way, made by Aphyr; also the name of Aphyr's blog about database testing
• Mongo: short for MongoDB, another DB product we hear about often
• OLAP (Online Analytics Processing): a class of applications where the most common queries are long and touch most of the data at a time with complex computations -- contrast with OLTP
• OLTP (Online Transaction Processing): a class of applications where the most common queries are short and touch a bit of data at a time with simple computations -- contrast with OLAP
• Production monkey: person deploying new versions and maintaining test clusters during a week
• Range: a portion of the data in a DB
• Reg cluster: prod cluster on GCE storing our usage stats
• Replication factor: how many copies there are of each Range in a DB or Zone
• Replica: one of the copies of some Range in a DB or Zone
• Rho: test cluster on GCE
• Spanner (Google product): another project we get inspiration from
• Team City: one of our continuous integration tools
• Time series: a way to organize data in a DB where the data is organized primarily by time; commonly used to store events over time; sometimes subject to OLAP applications
• Trigger: a way for a user to ask the database to ping the user (or an app) back when some data changes
• Zones: CockroachDB way to set different configuration parameters to different parts of a cluster, can be used to set replication factors and will be perhaps used for data sovereignty