231–240 of 456 posts
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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.
Congratulations to the Spanner team for becoming part of the Google public cloud! And for those wondering, this is why Oracle wants billions of dollars from Google for "Java Copyright Infringement" because the only growth market for Oracle right now is their hosted database service, and whoops Google has a better one now. It will be interesting if Amazon and Microsoft choose to compete with Google on this service. If…
Congratulations to the Spanner team for becoming part of the Google public cloud! And for those wondering, this is why Oracle wants billions of dollars from Google for "Java Copyright Infringement" because the only growth market for Oracle right now is their hosted database service, and whoops Google has a better one now. It will be interesting if Amazon and Microsoft choose to compete with Google on this service. If…
How is Google's cloud MySQL better than Oracle?
GOOGLE.
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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…
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…
The second idea that interests me is this idea of very high technology. It is built upon layer after layer of very clever tech year after year that I wonder how long it would take to start again from scratch if some disaster rendered a large part of one of these layers unusable.
For instance, if you were on a desert island, could you (would you want to?) build some piece of tech? An electric generator would be useful, perhaps. How long would it take to build? You'd need knowledge, raw materials, plant, fuel etc. It's not an easy solve. And that's way down the tech stack before you start talking about AIs. I suppose what I'm saying is, that the AI layer is based upon such high tech, that is inherently fragile, because it is so hard to do.
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Aphyr covers the impossibility of practical CA systems here: https://aphyr.com/posts/325-comments-on-you-do-it-too Sometimes it's helpful to consider a distributed system through the lens of "harvest vs yield" where harvest is the proportion of information in a system reflected by a response, and yield which is the probability of receiving a response at all. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.2…
That's a good summary by Aphyr he said it better than me of course. Now I know it is Eric Brewer himself who wrote that announcement. So I make no claim disproving him or knowing better than, I am just struggling to understand the implications. That CA terms has caused a lot of confusion (at least to me) and so far from what I have read talking about CA systems doesn't make sense. Never heard of harvest & yield that'…
We know that we can't have 100% harvest and 100% yield in the presence of partitions. We can play with different things though to shape the curve of these things as conditions worsen, however
This release shows the different philosophies of Google vs Amazon in an interesting way. Google prefers building advanced systems that let you do things "the old way" but making them horizontally scalable. Amazon prefers to acknowledge that network partitions exist and try to get you to do things "the new way" that deals with that failure case in the software instead of trying to hide it. I'm not saying either system…
Amazon: Create usual services and sell them. Google: Make unique products that push the boundaries of what was previously thought possible. Amazon: Don't care about inefficiencies and usage. Inefficiencies can be handled by charging more to the clients, usage doesn't matter because the users are mostly the clients and they don't feel their pain. Google: Had to make all their core technologies efficient, performant, s…
Which Amazon totally didn't have to do with their firehose of cash?
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It would be very interesting to have your product at the 200-300$ pricepoint. Currently, the lowest tier starts at almost 2000$ per month for the high availability version. I'm not trying to compare on a per-mb level, but it would be nice for smaller scale workloads.
Helpful feedback, we do have a development plan for $99, but it's not really intended for production workloads. If you only have 10 GB of data we'd heavily recommend going with something like RDS or Heroku Postgres. At that amount of data single node Postgres works great.
I wonder how this will affect adoption of CockroachDB [1], which was inspired by Spanner and supposedly an open source equivalent. I'd imagine that Spanner is a rather compelling choice, since they don't have to host it themselves. As far as I know, CockroachDB currently does not support providing CockroachDB as a service (but it is on their roadmap) [2]. [1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-questi…
https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clo... > A simple statement of the contrast between Spanner and CockroachDB would be: Spanner always waits on writes for a short interval, whereas CockroachDB sometimes waits on reads for a longer interval. How long is that interval? Well it depends on how clocks on CockroachDB nodes are being synchronized. Using NTP, it’s likely to be up to 250ms. Not great, b…
> Does this mean that Spanner is a CA system as defined by CAP? The short answer is “no” technically, but “yes” in effect and its users can and do assume CA. It's somewhat ironic that Brewer, the original author of the CAP theorem, is making this sort of marketing-led bending of the CAP theorem terminology. I think what he really should be saying is something in more nuanced language like this: https://martin.kleppma…
You're omitting what immediately follows: > The purist answer is “no” because partitions can happen and in fact have happened at Google, and during some partitions, Spanner chooses C and forfeits A. It is technically a CP system. > However, no system provides 100% availability, so the pragmatic question is whether or not Spanner delivers availability that is so high that most users don't worry about its outages. For…
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Helpful feedback, we do have a development plan for $99, but it's not really intended for production workloads. If you only have 10 GB of data we'd heavily recommend going with something like RDS or Heroku Postgres. At that amount of data single node Postgres works great.
RDS is not single node - its multi-AZ replicated. And that's what we are paying 300$ instead of 99$ for. Imagine.. RDS is literally the ONLY place where you can buy a 10 GB data multi-AZ replicated, snapshotted and managed postgresql. Its pretty much a monopoly, now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql.
Not true. I was looking for a hosted Postgres provider and discovered these two:
https://aiven.io/postgresql (tried it, worked excellently)