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!

The definitions should be given in Simple English. If you find them difficult to understand, ask to clarify!

• 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
• ORM (Object-Relational Mapping): a piece of software used by an app to access a DB
• Production monkey: person deploying new versions and maintaining test clusters during a week
• Range: a portion of the data in a DB
• Reg cluster: production cluster on Google Cloud 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