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NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blame Spanner

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131–140 of 319 posts

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

#131
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So yes, Google can be very impressed with Google. But I'm not sure that's the issue here. Is it really surprising that people who have extremely precise time needs and a whole team devoted to solving them would notice issues that other people wouldn't? I think it's a very common pattern that a product has some set of trailblazer users who find issues before the people who make the product. Also, I think you're over-i…

If some condition existed that exceeded GPS intended design, you most certainly wouldn't learn of it first from some random anecdote on HN.. more likely the front page of the BBC as the transportation system instantly collapses So the anecdote itself is noise, it's intended to show how seriously intractable a problem accurate time is, but it doesn't do that, instead it only demonstrates OP's lack of familiarity with…

Sub-millisecond flaws in GPS would make the transportation system collapse? Why?

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

#133
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are going to notice a 300m deviation due to landmarks and their eyes.

Rarely, if you are navigating at sea or in the air or in the woods... and even on the road, it is not uncommon for my GPS device to be clearly off without justifying the conclusion that there is a fault in a satellite.

Unless I'm woefully off base here, if the satellites were incorrect, you would basically be permanently 300m off, not just temporarily.

There's not so many GPS satellites out there that you're going to be bouncing around them all the time - even if only one is affected, it would be very noticeable for extended periods of time.

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

#135
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are going to notice a 300m deviation due to landmarks and their eyes.

Rarely, if you are navigating at sea or in the air or in the woods... and even on the road, it is not uncommon for my GPS device to be clearly off without justifying the conclusion that there is a fault in a satellite.

Come on, in urban traffic a 300m error will easily place one in a parallel street.

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

#136
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagreement about what though? Does Spanner's solution have an objective problem? Do you or others in your community have specific reasons to believe that it cannot deliver on its promises?

Spanner's approach requires help from hardware and several full time employees maintaining and ensuring the uncertainty guarantees. This increases the cost of the maintaining the system, which for Cloud Spanner is partially passed on to the end users. If you can build a system that doesn't require time synchronization, yet doesn't have any significant drawbacks relative to what Spanner provides, you'd be better off u…

You clearly have an agenda here, the blog post contains little information while spreading FUD. Never heard of calvin and will now avoid it.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If some condition existed that exceeded GPS intended design, you most certainly wouldn't learn of it first from some random anecdote on HN.. more likely the front page of the BBC as the transportation system instantly collapses So the anecdote itself is noise, it's intended to show how seriously intractable a problem accurate time is, but it doesn't do that, instead it only demonstrates OP's lack of familiarity with…

Sub-millisecond flaws in GPS would make the transportation system collapse? Why?

Triangulation of location is bounded by the accuracy of those clocks.

1 microsecond is 300 meters of error.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If some condition existed that exceeded GPS intended design, you most certainly wouldn't learn of it first from some random anecdote on HN.. more likely the front page of the BBC as the transportation system instantly collapses So the anecdote itself is noise, it's intended to show how seriously intractable a problem accurate time is, but it doesn't do that, instead it only demonstrates OP's lack of familiarity with…

Sub-millisecond flaws in GPS would make the transportation system collapse? Why?

Precise geolocation relies on extreme time accuracy (the story always being that relativistic time dilation effects with the difference in gravity on the surface vs LEO must be accounted for), so yeah, it wouldn't surprise me one bit that the accuracy required is on the order of much less than a millisecond.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure someone has talked about this and proven or disproven it, but I’ve always been a little uneasy with the truetime protocol. I mean it’s faster than Raft, but for the use case maybe we are trying to fix the wrong problem? If two events are independent, it matters very little what order we record them in the system of record. My whole career we have been building cause and effect at transaction time but when we…

I think if 2 events are independent then you can use an eventually consistent DB like Cassandra and move on with your day. The importance of something like TrueTime arises when you have an example like in the article. Step 1: remove your parents from seeing your photo albums. Step 2: post your spring break photo album

That doesn't sound like a system you need "true time" for. :(

Of course, I think I just like thinking about how true time will start to fail once we get beyond the earth. Consider, what is the true time for events we are seeing in the stars right now?

Granted, I fully cede that being able to rely on a fully sequenced notion of time that everyone is a part of makes some reasoning much easier.

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

#140
post #110

The CAP theorem has been truly disastrous for databases. The CAP theorem simply says that if you have a database on 2 servers and the connection between those serves goes down, then queries against one server don't see new updates from the other server, so you either have to give up consistency (serve stale data) or give up availability (one of the servers refuses to process further requests). That's all that CAP is,…

You can't always "choose another server" while maintaining low latency operations.
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