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Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

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Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#171

Post by cjmcqueen »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #158
scarmig wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolute level of computation available isn't changing at the consumer level. What's happening for the next decade is the destruction of businesses hosting their own IT infrastructure and moving it to a couple of core centers. So, the computational "Gini index" is increasing, but no one is being thrown into computational poverty.

The parent comment doesn't seem to specify "consumer level" and the loss of businesses having their own infrastructure is equally troubling. Everyone is putting a lot of eggs in a very small number of baskets.

I would disagree about the character of the situation. This isn't about people putting eggs in a few baskets, it's that it's more efficient to have centralized chicken coops instead of every family in the world owning their own chickens.

Now, you could play with that analogy further and see some issues as well, but I don't think the issue here is centralized failure; all these data centers/"clouds" are at least good. The Cloud is about businesses focusing on core business and not supporting functions.

[Disclosure, I work on the Google Cloud team, I'm biased]

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#173

Post by craigkerstiens »

sandGorgon wrote: post #169
craigkerstiens wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craig from Citus here. Thanks for the kind words. We've seen a lot of people scale-out transactional workloads with Citus as well. In particular, we've seen a lot of multi-tenant apps that need to keep scaling beyond a single node when they're running into memory or compute issues. If you are looking for something that is more Postgres flavored (meaning we're just an extension to it so you get all the good stuff of P…

It would be very interesting to have your product at the 200-300$ pricepoint. Currently, the lowest tier starts at almost 2000$ per month for the high availability version. I'm not trying to compare on a per-mb level, but it would be nice for smaller scale workloads.

Helpful feedback, we do have a development plan for $99, but it's not really intended for production workloads. If you only have 10 GB of data we'd heavily recommend going with something like RDS or Heroku Postgres. At that amount of data single node Postgres works great.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#174

Post by advisedwang »

kennethmac2000 wrote: post #99

Looks cool, but the pricing seems a bit non-cloud-native (or at least non-GCP-native). "You are charged each hour for the maximum number of nodes that exist during that hour." We've been educated by Google to consider per-minute, per-instance/node billing normal - and presumably all the arguments about why this is the right, pro-customer way to price GCE apply equally to Cloud Spanner.

The per-minute billing is an advantage when you are scaling up and down rapidly. If you use VMs just for 5 minutes, per minute pricing is 20x cheaper than hourly billing.

However with a database it is rare to scale up and down rapidly. Rather you expect change over the order of days. Imagine you go from 10 instance to 15 instances over a week. per minute billing only saves a possible 5 instance-hours over the week compared to hourly billing, which is less than 1% saving.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#177

Post by mistermann »

kornish wrote: post #129
ChuckMcM wrote: post #89

Congratulations to the Spanner team for becoming part of the Google public cloud! And for those wondering, this is why Oracle wants billions of dollars from Google for "Java Copyright Infringement" because the only growth market for Oracle right now is their hosted database service, and whoops Google has a better one now. It will be interesting if Amazon and Microsoft choose to compete with Google on this service. If…

> It will be interesting if Amazon and Microsoft choose to compete with Google on this service. If we get to the point where you have databases, compute, storage, and connectivity services from those three at equal scale, well that would be a lot of choice for the developers! There are also plenty of choices evolving for developers who aren't looking for hosted solutions (which can sometimes be a showstopper for ente…

As someone who works (in part) in the MS SQL field, is it irrational to be a bit worried about the effects some of these platform advances might have one one's career?

For example, being a MSSQL performance tuning expert requires years of experience and probably pays very well, but just the other day I read an anecdotal story where someone switched a large BI database to use columnar indexes, allowing them to replace very complex (extreme manual tuning to achieve acceptable performance) queries with just standard SQL with comparable performance.

How long until the scale, pricing, and now transparent & full(?) sql compliance offered by these cloud platforms starts to make traditional RDBMS platforms a niche platform?

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#179

Post by obstinate »

MichaelGG wrote: post #119
koolba wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the confusion but I meant the DML portion.

It sounded like you can only modify by primary key? Can you make a transaction that contains a query and a bunch of updates by PK ? And yeah it makes it sound like writing an OEM adapter will be much more difficult.

From reading the docs, the answer seems to clearly be yes, but I'm open to being corrected.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#180

Post by WorldMaker »

jedberg wrote: post #150
inopinatus wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People used to make similar comparisons between the Russian and American space programs.

Oh yeah? Which was which in that comparison? I'm not familiar with that.

Presumably a reference to the classic "Pencil myth": Americans when faced with a need to write things down spent millions of dollars inventing a low gravity ballpoint pen and Russians just used a pencil.

As cutesy of a sentiment as it is, it's also full of misconceptions. The pens were invented by an American corporation that wanted better pens to sell in general (a smoother flow in a pen, regardless of gravity/orientation, is a better pen), and they saw a good opportunity to market the pen to NASA for use in space. Both NASA and the Russians used pencils in space, but the problems with pencils is the flakes can pollute an environment pretty quickly in low gravity and the pens turned out to be a much better solution. (So far as I've heard, every space agency these days buys similar pens.)

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