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

Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 456 posts

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#211

Post by inopinatus »

WorldMaker wrote: post #180
jedberg wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah? Which was which in that comparison? I'm not familiar with that.

Presumably a reference to the classic "Pencil myth": Americans when faced with a need to write things down spent millions of dollars inventing a low gravity ballpoint pen and Russians just used a pencil. As cutesy of a sentiment as it is, it's also full of misconceptions. The pens were invented by an American corporation that wanted better pens to sell in general (a smoother flow in a pen, regardless of gravity/orien…

You presume wrong. Pens are not a space program.

I meant the differences in design philosophy that permeate aerospace engineering on both sides. Russian, built ugly but for strength and longevity. American, built for high capability with finesse and finer tolerances. The emergent properties of these different principles explain why Soyuz is still a preferred launch vehicle, but it was the Americans who got to the moon and operated the STS.

Amazon is more like the Russians: built in the knowledge that things fail, but less magical as a result. Google is more like the Americans: remarkable technology, you just need a herd of geniuses to run it.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#212

Post by Godel_unicode »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #181
mistermann wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works (in part) in the MS SQL field, is it irrational to be a bit worried about the effects some of these platform advances might have one one's career? For example, being a MSSQL performance tuning expert requires years of experience and probably pays very well, but just the other day I read an anecdotal story where someone switched a large BI database to use columnar indexes, allowing them to replace…

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.

Not sure if this is what you intended, but you are aware that SQL server was developed in partnership with Sybase until the mid-90s (when they were substantially the same product) right?

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#213

Post by sbarre »

jahewson wrote: post #127
ChuckMcM wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going by this document: http://s1.q4cdn.com/289076952/files/doc_financials/quarterly... Which has their 'cloud services' doubling their contribution to revenue year over year and licenses losing 50% of their contribution to revenue year over year. There 'cloud' collateral is pretty opaque though.

Yes, the "cloud" includes all of their non-database offerings too which have been the focus of recent growth/acquisitions.

A lot of Oracle's "cloud" products are just their traditional single-tenant/on-prem software that they offer to run for you in their own environments.

You're still buying the same stuff, but you're outsourcing your dev ops to them on top of it (which may not be a bad thing).

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#214

Post by cobookman »

abalone wrote: post #186
manacit wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aurora is a 'better MySQL mousetrap', IMO. This is a globally-available, nearly-CAP-beating datastore that powers one of the biggest websites on the internet. It's not quite apples and oranges, but this is definitely a different problem they are solving.

That's vague. AWS also powers huge websites and Amazon is recommending Aurora as the "default choice" for most workloads.[1] There are certainly significant architectural differences but I would say we can definitely make a direct practical comparison. [1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2953299/cloud-computing...

If Aurora powers huge websites, spanner is for ginormous websites. Think a multiplier to netflix's database needs.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#215

Post by [deleted] »

abalone wrote: post #186
manacit wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aurora is a 'better MySQL mousetrap', IMO. This is a globally-available, nearly-CAP-beating datastore that powers one of the biggest websites on the internet. It's not quite apples and oranges, but this is definitely a different problem they are solving.

That's vague. AWS also powers huge websites and Amazon is recommending Aurora as the "default choice" for most workloads.[1] There are certainly significant architectural differences but I would say we can definitely make a direct practical comparison. [1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2953299/cloud-computing...

[deleted]

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#216

Post by rdtsc »

robryk wrote: post #98
rdtsc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you believe that partitions are inevitable, any distributed system How does that answer it? Are they implying that partitions will not happen if you don't believe in them?

A CA system is not a system that doesn't have partitions, it's a system that works under the condition that there are no partitions (ie. it is a non-partition-resistant system).

> , it's a system that works under the condition that there are no partitions

But that is not a choice with distributed systems, unless as soon as a partition happens the system shuts down immediately. That is it effectively disappears and never re-appears again. But that's not a CA system then?

Or saying that it is not partition resistant is also difficult because the system in case of a partition will do _something_. The typical choices is that it either responds to clients (trying to be AP) or it doesn't (trying to be CP).

That is why I understand CA systems as equivalent to the belief that "partitions can't happen". Which I think is unrealistic.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#217

Post by evanweaver »

amalag wrote: post #194
jchrisa wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a bit of a veteran in the database industry, I concur (at least about the impact on Oracle's database business). There is a lot of pent-up demand for anything that offers distributed consistency. We've been seeing this demand at Fauna. FaunaDB offers distributed consistency, based on Raft and the Calvin protocol instead of depending on specific networking and clock hardware. We've seen a big part of our appeal is…

What is the monetisation plan? Purely SAAS with on-premise or an open source version with support like postgres/mysql?

The serverless cloud is pay-as-you-go. There is no minimum spend, unlike Spanner's $1000 per month (apparently). And it's cheaper than operating any open source on cloud hardware.

On-premises is licensed by core.

We have a developer edition you can use on your local machine, but we don't currently have plans to open source FaunaDB itself.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#218

Post by krenoten »

suprgeek wrote: post #87

Really a CP system but with the Availability being five 9s or better (less than one failure in 10^6) How: 1)Hardware - Gobs and Gobs of Hardware and SRE experience "Spanner is not running over the public Internet — in fact, every Spanner packet flows only over Google-controlled routers and links (excluding any edge links to remote clients). Furthermore, each data center typically has at least three independent fibers…

MTBF of 2PC-strapped-to-quorum is no different from MTBF of a 2PC-strapped-to-spof replicas.

MTTR is bounded by reelection latency, rather than replica recovery, although you still may eat a write amplification cost for rereplication.

write amplification is 3-5x of non-quorum-backed 2PC system, depending on replication ensemble size.

google further multiplies write amplification with geo-redundancy, so bump that WA by another 3x+.

it's an insanely high cost to pay for availability, but for an advertising company it's important to count the beans accurately.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#219

Post by dantiberian »

koolba wrote: post #5

> Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability. This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't? Separately, (emphasis mine): > If you have a MySQL or PostgreSQL system th…

> This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't?

Your's is a bold claim also :) What do you know about the CAP theorem that Eric Brewer doesn't?

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#220

Post by CaveTech »

macintux wrote: post #196
edaemon wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Aurora has a single write master, though it does have automatic write failover -- i.e. if the Aurora primary dies, one of your read replicas is promoted to the primary and reads/writes are directed to the new instance. That does constrain your primary's capabilities to the largest instance size (currently a db.r3.8xlarge). I don't have a good idea what the upper limit is for an Aurora database setup.

How does Aurora know that the primary is dead? Automatic failover is problematic in a distributed system.

AWS uses heartbeats for detecting liveliness. If x heartbeats fail the failover procedure is started. Generally 10s - 5minutes. In practice (for me) the failover has been less than 15s.
Post reply on HN