Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 456 posts

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#21

Post by fmihaila »

koolba wrote: post #5

> Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability. This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't? Separately, (emphasis mine): > If you have a MySQL or PostgreSQL system th…

> This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't?

It's right there in the article:

"Remarkably, Cloud Spanner achieves this combination of features without violating the CAP Theorem. To understand how, read this post by the author of the CAP Theorem and Google Vice President of Infrastructure, Eric Brewer."

The post they are referring to: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/inside-Cloud-Sp...

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#23

Post by marknadal »

koolba wrote: post #5

> Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability. This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't? Separately, (emphasis mine): > If you have a MySQL or PostgreSQL system th…

Theoretically it means they are giving up on being Partition Tolerant. There was a popular post a while ago about how the P can't be sacrificed. Because if it is... everything else will fail.

Being Google they are probably prideful enough to think their servers could never have an outage. Which yes, I agree with you, that is a very scary claim.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#24

Post by ProblemFactory »

koolba wrote: post #5

> Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability. This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't? Separately, (emphasis mine): > If you have a MySQL or PostgreSQL system th…

There is a link at the end of the article to a blog post on exactly this topic:

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/inside-Cloud-Sp...

> The purist answer is “no” because partitions can happen and in fact have happened at Google, and during some partitions, Spanner chooses C and forfeits A. It is technically a CP system.

> However, no system provides 100% availability, so the pragmatic question is whether or not Spanner delivers availability that is so high that most users don't worry about its outages.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#25

Post by [deleted] »

koolba wrote: post #5

> Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability. This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't? Separately, (emphasis mine): > If you have a MySQL or PostgreSQL system th…

[deleted]

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#26

Post by gigatexal »

elvinyung wrote: post #19
koolba wrote: post #5

> Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability. This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't? Separately, (emphasis mine): > If you have a MySQL or PostgreSQL system th…

Why? Strong consistency isn't mutually exclusive with scalability. Google has written about it at length[1][2][3]. Furthermore, there are already more than a few attempts underway to build scalable relational databases ("NewSQL") outside Google.[4] 1: https://research.google.com/pubs/pub36971.html 2: https://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html 3: http://datascienceassn.org/sites/default/files/F1%20A%20Dist... 4:…

First time I'm hearing about newSQL thanks for these links.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#28

Post by jaboutboul »

koolba wrote: post #5

> Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability. This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't? Separately, (emphasis mine): > If you have a MySQL or PostgreSQL system th…

Their explanation is here: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/inside-Cloud-Sp...
Post reply on HN