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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

#331

Post by euyyn »

hackuser wrote: post #276
euyyn wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like being sad about the emergence of banks, because everybody's money is being kept in a small number of vaults instead of under each one's mattress.

A good point, but there is an up and downside to everything. The centralization of IT does impact civil liberties and possibly innovation - unlike FOSS and other local systems, aspiring hackers can't tinker with Facebook code and see how it works.

I don't understand how Facebook relates to this, as they don't rent their cloud. Aspiring hackers couldn't tinker with MS Word 2000 code either.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#332

Post by hackuser »

euyyn wrote: post #331
hackuser wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good point, but there is an up and downside to everything. The centralization of IT does impact civil liberties and possibly innovation - unlike FOSS and other local systems, aspiring hackers can't tinker with Facebook code and see how it works.

I don't understand how Facebook relates to this, as they don't rent their cloud. Aspiring hackers couldn't tinker with MS Word 2000 code either.

> Aspiring hackers couldn't tinker with MS Word 2000 code either.

They could tinker with the binaries, something many did with game binaries. But your point is well taken; open source is also very valuable to innovation.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#333

Post by euyyn »

hackuser wrote: post #332
euyyn wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how Facebook relates to this, as they don't rent their cloud. Aspiring hackers couldn't tinker with MS Word 2000 code either.

> Aspiring hackers couldn't tinker with MS Word 2000 code either. They could tinker with the binaries, something many did with game binaries. But your point is well taken; open source is also very valuable to innovation.

Web apps were also very useful for learning JS and browser APIs, before everybody started minimizing and obfuscating it. I learned how to write a rich-text editor just by looking at the code of Hotmail's email editor.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#335

Post by inopinatus »

WorldMaker wrote: post #250
inopinatus wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You presume wrong. Pens are not a space program. I meant the differences in design philosophy that permeate aerospace engineering on both sides. Russian, built ugly but for strength and longevity. American, built for high capability with finesse and finer tolerances. The emergent properties of these different principles explain why Soyuz is still a preferred launch vehicle, but it was the Americans who got to the moo…

Sorry if you think I made the wrong presumption, but I've seen the "pencil myth" trotted out many times as a "definitive" example of precisely the dichotomy that you have spelled out. (A low gravity ballpoint pen is high capability that requires finesse and fine tolerances; a pencil is ugly but strong and typically exhibits longevity... and so forth.) It is an interesting analogy this dichotomy you see in the design…

You can see the same in comparing the military aircraft design. Both schools are ingenious, but it is applied in different ways. There are some excellent comparisons connecting principles to outcomes on Quora.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#336

Post by parasubvert »

aamederen wrote: post #132
tedd4u wrote: post #33

The team here at Quizlet did a lot of performance testing on Spanner with one of our MySQL workloads to see if it's an option for us. Here are the test results: https://quizlet.com/blog/quizlet-cloud-spanner

I'm reading the test results and had a question. >> Cloud Spanner doesn't, however, support data manipulation language (DML) statements. DML includes SQL queries like INSERT and UPDATE. Instead, Spanner's interface definition includes RPCs for mutating rows given their primary key[21]. Does this mean I need to rewrite my application? My application uses an ORM and it typically converts my logic to SQL statements and…

No, though it does imply you would need to write adapter code to have your ORM call the equivalent stored procedures for inserts or deletes. Most ORMs can do this to varying degrees.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#337

Post by jinqueeny »

bdarnell wrote: post #189
karlding wrote: post #47

I wonder how this will affect adoption of CockroachDB [1], which was inspired by Spanner and supposedly an open source equivalent. I'd imagine that Spanner is a rather compelling choice, since they don't have to host it themselves. As far as I know, CockroachDB currently does not support providing CockroachDB as a service (but it is on their roadmap) [2]. [1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-questi…

(Cockroach Labs CTO here) Google launching Spanner is generally a positive thing for our industry and our product. It's more proof that what we're aiming for is possible and that there's demand for it. We expect that in five years, all tech companies will be deploying technology like ours. One of the big differences is that Spanner only uses SQL for read-only operations, with a custom API for writes. We use standard…

> Google launching Spanner is generally a positive thing for our industry and our product. It's more proof that what we're aiming for is possible and that there's demand for it. We expect that in five years, all tech companies will be deploying technology like ours. Echo on this! It's truly exciting moment for each and everyone in the field.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#338

Post by edaemon »

rgrove wrote: post #315
arjunnarayan wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimum 3 nodes * node pricing of $.90/hour = 3 0.9 24*30 = 1944/month.

Where is this 3-node minimum mentioned? URL please? Edit: Looks like maybe you're referring to the recommended 3 node minimum in production mentioned at https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/instance-configuration

While I'm not familiar with Spanner's inner workings, I would guess that they recommend 3 instances for quorum establishment in case a region becomes unreachable. If that's the case, using fewer than 3 instances could cause major problems.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#339

Post by parasubvert »

jplahn wrote: post #302
user5994461 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has to support Google, Youtube and many of the most resources intensive services in existence on Earth. They needed to be "efficient enough" to operate that, meaning incredibly efficient. Amazon runs nothing, it's an outsourcing firm. They needed to make services "good enough" to be sold. If a service is somewhat inefficient, it just charges the clients more to cover the costs. Technologies reflect the busines…

You do realize the way most services get into AWS is that they're first built in the retail side of Amazon (without any thought towards AWS) and then once people realize it's effectively solving an actual problem, it's rebuilt for AWS. Having to support Amazon retail is a pretty demanding stress test -- I'm not sure why you're getting this notion that Amazon doesn't run anything. I should think handling Black Friday…

That is something of a myth. AWS was created and evolves completely separately from retail, which didn't really use it in anger until 2010ish. Retail is effectively a large customer to AWS. They're very good at watching what customers are doing in general.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#340

Post by parasubvert »

takeda wrote: post #159
sudhirj wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the technical blog post > Does this mean that Spanner is a CA system as defined by CAP? The short answer is “no” technically, but “yes” in effect and its users can and do assume CA. 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 essentially a marketing buzz. "It's always available because we spent a lot of money to make it available" CAP is about how the system deals with partitions not whether it has partitions or not.

The person who wrote this "marketing buzz" is Eric Brewer, who was the originator of the CAP theorem in the first place. I think he knows what it was about :)
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