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

highscalability.com

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

#11

Post by grandalf »

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…

It's as if someone just implemented a crude parser to map SELECT statements into a query for whatever the underlyig nosql system happens to be.

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

#13

Post by cgs1019 »

This article comes across as really cynical and entirely lacking in the kind of rigor and detail I have previously found on highscalability. Spanner is really mind-blowingly cool tech. I thought this article was much more informative and worth the time to read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4562546

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

#15

Post by sigil »

Buzzword headline aside, the Spanner paper is great and worth your time. As is the BigTable paper, the Dremel paper, and the Paxos Made Live paper.

I read the Google whitepapers and wonder, is there anywhere else one can go to work on real solutions to distributed systems problems? At smaller scales you can cheat -- you don't need Paxos, you can get away with non-consensus-based master / slave failover. You can play the odds with failure modes. At Google's scale, you can't: behavior under normally unlikely failures matters, probability matters, CAP matters.

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

#16

Post by chops »

sigil wrote: post #15

Buzzword headline aside, the Spanner paper is great and worth your time. As is the BigTable paper, the Dremel paper, and the Paxos Made Live paper. I read the Google whitepapers and wonder, is there anywhere else one can go to work on real solutions to distributed systems problems? At smaller scales you can cheat -- you don't need Paxos, you can get away with non-consensus-based master / slave failover. You can play…

You could go to Basho to work on Riak Enterprise.

http://basho.com/products/riak-enterprise/

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

#17

Post by Dave_Rosenthal »

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 the freedom that transactions afford you to build abstractions and other data models on top of whatever you are given. In our product's case, a low-level ordered K/V store is used for a storage layer and several different data models are exposed on top (see http://foundationdb.com/#layers).

I think the future of databases has a diversity of data models and query languages (including SQL, document, K/V, columnar, etc.). I also think the future of databases is ACID. It seems like more and more of the NoSQL early adopters (and creators) are coming to the same conclusion.

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

#18

Post by dkhenry »

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 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.

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

#19

Post by efuquen »

cgs1019 wrote: post #13

This article comes across as really cynical and entirely lacking in the kind of rigor and detail I have previously found on highscalability. Spanner is really mind-blowingly cool tech. I thought this article was much more informative and worth the time to read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4562546

"Another complicating factor is that as Masters of Disk it’s not surprising Google ..."

Masters of Disk? He seriously that that was a good line? One of the many things that annoyed me about that post. Thanks for the links.

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

#20

Post by neilk »

nostrademons wrote: post #14

It's really funny to watch tech journalists try to write about Google infrastructure from the outside, based only on one paper... Hell, it's usually really funny just to watch tech journalists try to write.

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.

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