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

Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In

highscalability.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 82 posts

Re: Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In

#31

Post by [deleted] »

seiji wrote: post #26
neilk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part that amuses me is their surprise that Google sees some advantage to transactions. Journalists (of any kind) want to see things in terms of personality or philosophical conflict, e.g. SQL vs NoSQL. Because it's what their readers understand, and usually, it's all that they understand. They don't seem to consider that people might be making rational choices and difficult tradeoffs.

If that site contains one journalist, I'll eat my diamond tiara. Let's call them blogophiles instead. Or reposting aggragists. Adveraggrapostsummarizers. "One who reposts content from other sites while attaching ads and providing a veneer of quote-unquote insight."

[deleted]

Re: Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In

#32

Post by bduerst »

seiji wrote: post #26
neilk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part that amuses me is their surprise that Google sees some advantage to transactions. Journalists (of any kind) want to see things in terms of personality or philosophical conflict, e.g. SQL vs NoSQL. Because it's what their readers understand, and usually, it's all that they understand. They don't seem to consider that people might be making rational choices and difficult tradeoffs.

If that site contains one journalist, I'll eat my diamond tiara. Let's call them blogophiles instead. Or reposting aggragists. Adveraggrapostsummarizers. "One who reposts content from other sites while attaching ads and providing a veneer of quote-unquote insight."

This is exactly why I think the "News" market is ripe for some disruptive product.

The only problem is that sources can send cease and desist letters to any company that effectively steals the sources' viewerbase.

Re: Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In

#33

Post by zaphar »

peterwwillis wrote: post #5

So is Spanner basically just a distributed mostly-relational database? It seems like to find the record you want you just search the indices of nodes like a B-tree and in a couple queries are left at the node with the records you want. The downside is all that lost write performance but since it's synchronous you can probably mitigate some of the rebalancing by having many indices of indices, so only a couple nodes h…

Don't mistake Transactional with Relational. Just because a database has transactions doesn't automatically mean it is Relational too.

Re: Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In

#34

Post by bcoates »

mwexler wrote: post #3
nolok wrote: post #2

NewSQL ? Seriously ? Do we really need another low-quality buzzword for people to re-use everywhere ?

I don't know, I think it's helpful. It changes the conversation from being about the access language to being focused on how a technology processes data at scale. Well, almost... Notice that even with the shift from "NoSQL" to "NewSQL", mentions of joins continues to be conspicuously absent from many of these discussions. So, it's worth noting that many of these NewSQL things are "almost but not quite SQL", hence the…

I don't think Spanner is one of these fake-relational databases, it's an ACID datastore that's used as underlying storage for the real RDBMS F1.

From the F1 paper (http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38125.html) It looks like it's mostly intended as an improvement to sharded MySQL, by putting the sharding where it belongs, down at the physical storage level, instead of up at the client access level.

Maybe a better buzzword would be NoMySQL (NOracle?)

Re: Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In

#35

Post by dmix »

neovive wrote: post #9

With some of the best programming minds in the world, it's interesting to see that Google finds it more efficient for programmers to solve the performance issues vs reimplementing core db functionality, such as transactions. I like the direction of moving closer to original database theory concepts and allowing the creative energy to focus on solutions to performance problems at high-scale.

> best programming minds

They probably have a lot of great minds at the top of Google but there's still going to be a significant amount of average ones, just like in any company/structure.

Re: Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In

#36

Post by akldfgj »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #6
DanWaterworth wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there should be a term for these new DBMSs, but the problem with NewSQL is that the thing they have in common is not SQL, but consistency and transactions.

So your saying its not ACID its more like Ecstasy?

It is ACID. It is a DBMS. It's not a Relational DBMS.

Re: Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In

#37

Post by VonGuard »

bduerst wrote: post #32
seiji wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that site contains one journalist, I'll eat my diamond tiara. Let's call them blogophiles instead. Or reposting aggragists. Adveraggrapostsummarizers. "One who reposts content from other sites while attaching ads and providing a veneer of quote-unquote insight."

This is exactly why I think the "News" market is ripe for some disruptive product. The only problem is that sources can send cease and desist letters to any company that effectively steals the sources' viewerbase.

I can't really apologize for my brethren in the market, but yes, tech journalism tends to be terrible. The journalism market was already disrupted by Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Blogs in particular are great, because instead of reading what some idiot from journalism school has to say about, oh, I dunno.... uhm.... exceptions versus errors in programming languages (as touched off by that Python vs. Go post), instead of reading some wonk's interpretation, you can instead read a developer's opinion.

In the meantime I just wanted to point out that everyone and their mother is making "announcements" about Spanner, and usually trying to make the world think they're better. Mostly this is from NoSQL companies.

Re: Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In

#38

Post by akldfgj »

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #21
dkhenry wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how you see the publishing of the Spanner paper effects your product? Does this give validity to your product seeing as there is a production system with similar features to yours already in use, or is there a risk Google might provide this system as a service to other companies possibly competing with you.

Well, it doesn't seem like it's their ambition, but there's no doubt that if Google released all of their in-house data tools, including Spanner, that it would drastically change the market. We love to see this stuff, though. When we started building our product over three years ago, the idea of a distributed, ACID database was sort of laughed at. (I think the CAP theorem scared a lot of people off from building real…

What's not their ambition?

http://cloud.google.com/products /compute-engine.html /cloud-storage.html /big-query.html /more-products.html

Re: Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In

#39

Post by scott_s »

rbanffy wrote: post #30
Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #17

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of a database company (FoundationDB) building a scalable, ACID database. I couldn't agree more with main quote that they pulled from the paper, expressing the difficulty of (even great) programmers having to "code around the lack of transactions." Ease of development is one of the biggest benefits of transactions. However, another huge benefit that didn't get much play in the article is t…

I don't think what defines NoSQL is the lack of transactions. In fact, lack of transactions is not even a common trait among all things called NoSQL. To be absolutely sincere, I think we should get rid of the word NoSQL. As for NewSQL, we shouldn't have started using it. It's great for branding, but it confuses journalists.

I prefer to call NoSQL "non-relational database."

Re: Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In

#40

Post by jbigelow76 »

exabrial wrote: post #27

So... transactions are cool again? Thank goodness!

Transactions have always been cool, it's just that business that don't need to them have always been cooler in the in the world of tech journalism so they don't get much mention. If something goes wrong at Instagram nobody really cares if you they don't roll back posting the picture of your pastrami sandwich just because the #lolcatz tag got applied by mistake.
Post reply on HN