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NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blame Spanner

dbmsmusings.blogspot.com

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Re: NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blame Spanner

#5
post #2

I'm the author of that post. I'm happy to respond to comments on the post on this thread for the next several hours. You can also leave comments on the post itself, and I will respond there at any time.

I've only ever worked on small projects so I'm not at all familiar with these very high-scale distributed databases but from the post it seems to indicate that Spanner is in a league of its own because it integrated hardware into the mix where the others are software only. What are the differences in scale between the two categories mentioned?

Re: NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blame Spanner

#6
post #2

I'm the author of that post. I'm happy to respond to comments on the post on this thread for the next several hours. You can also leave comments on the post itself, and I will respond there at any time.

Do these concerns also apply in an HTAP or OLAP context e.g. systems like Cloudera's Kudu, which uses Hybrid Time? Or maybe Volt which you also worked on?

Re: NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blame Spanner

#8
post #5
post #2

I'm the author of that post. I'm happy to respond to comments on the post on this thread for the next several hours. You can also leave comments on the post itself, and I will respond there at any time.

I've only ever worked on small projects so I'm not at all familiar with these very high-scale distributed databases but from the post it seems to indicate that Spanner is in a league of its own because it integrated hardware into the mix where the others are software only. What are the differences in scale between the two categories mentioned?

Yes, Spanner is quite unusual in the distributed database world in how hardware is a pretty important part of their solution. Other systems may claim important integrations with hardware, but for Spanner, the architecture really relies on particular hardware assumptions.

To answer your question about scale: there is no real practical difference in scalability between the two categories discussed in the post. Partitioned consensus has better theoretical scalability, but I am not aware of any real-world workload that can not be handled by global consensus with batching.

Re: NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blame Spanner

#9
post #3

In case you're wondering : this is a very worthwhile read.

Too many false claims for my taste. Especially wrt to eventual consistency and consistency guarantees. Also some misinterpretation of CAP theorem to fit the narrative. Very typical FaunaDB promotional post.
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