Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

Microsoft has a history of sales and support that will allow them a certain longevity. They also have less "brand hate" than Oracle. I dont think MSSQL is going to be like Sybase any time soon, but I probably wouldn't focus on that stack starting now if you are into the startup or california scene. For many places in the USA, MS is the way to go.

EDIT: Also, most DB users don't need global-scale databases.

Monocultures are efficient, but not healthy ecosystems in the long term.

Chronologically, we have: SQL -> NoSQL -> NewSQL

You're both right.

I write software as a developer. This is how I earn my livelihood.

Four years ago, I determined that while development work might seem to be near the top of the food chain, there will at some point where my work will be replaced by AIs.

This is not so different from how word processors replaced the specialist job of typesetters. Word processors make "good enough" typesetting. You can still find typesetters practicing their craft; the rest of us use word processors and don't even think about it.

At the time, I was learning to put the Buddhist ideals of emptiness and impermanence to practice, and to become more emotionally aware: the _main_ reason I had thought I would never be replaced by an AI writing software has more to do with wishful thinking and attachment than any clear-sighted look at this.

I also made a decision to work on the technologies to accelerate this. Rather than becoming intoxicated by the worry, anxiety, and existential anguish, I decided try to face it. Fears are inherently irrational, but just because they are irrational does not mean it is not what you are experiencing. Fears are not so easily banished by labeling them as irrational. Denial is a form of willful ignorance.

Now, having said all that, whether our tech base will come to that, who can say?

Since then, I have been tracking things like:

Viv - a chat assistant that can write it's own queries

DeepMind's demonstration of creating a Turing-complete machine with deep learning using a memory module.

I watched a tech enthusiast write a chat bot. He does not write software professionally. Talking with him over the months when he tinkers with in his spare time, I realized that in the future, you won't have as many software engineers writing code; you would learn how to _train_ AIs when they become sufficiently accessible to the masses. Skills in coaching, negotiation, and management becomes more important then some of the fundamental skills supporting software engineering. And like typesetting, I can see development work being pushed down the eco-ladder.

It's not surprising to me to see that Wired article about how coding becoming blue collar work. And even that will eventually be pushed down even further.

It's not surprising to me about Google's site-reliability engineering book, branding, and approach. I have done system admin work in the past, and I can already see traditional, manual sysadmin work being replaced.

It's easy to get nihilistic about this, but that isn't my point here either. I know the human potential is incredible, but I think we have to let go of our self-serving narratives first.

(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 SQL for both reads and writes, which means we also work with major ORMs like GORM, SQLAlchemy, and Hibernate (docs should be live today or tomorrow). Spanner's custom write API will make it difficult to work with existing frameworks, or to convert an existing application to Spanner.

Cloud Spanner only works on Google Cloud and is a black-box managed service. CockroachDB is open source and can be run on-prem or in any cloud on commodity hardware. (We don't offer CockroachDB as a service yet, but may in the future)

At this point, both products are still in beta and are still missing features like back-up and restore (according to the Quizlet blog post). We plan to launch CockroachDB 1.0 with back-up / restore enabled.

* For anyone wanting to know more about how we make CockroachDB work without TrueTime, see our blog post: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clo...