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Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

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Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#281

Post by xapata »

edaemon wrote: post #277
xapata wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the latency on that failover isn't specified.

Do you mean the amount of time it takes to initiate a failover or the amount of time for a failover to complete? For the former, I don't think they specify beyond "automatic". For the latter, "service is typically restored in less than 120 seconds, and often less than 60 seconds": http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Aurora...

That's a pretty good cutover, but as you say, they should also include the time needed to detect a failure and initiate the transition.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#282

Post by biot »

_m8fo wrote: post #176

Forgive my ignorance, but could someone explain in layman's terms in which situation this would be helpful? E.g. if I have 1TB of data would I use this? If I have 1GB with a growth rate of 25GB/daily would I use this?

You may benefit from something like this if you do an analysis of your DB usage/growth patterns and determine that server/cluster scalability is going to be a non-trivial concern in the near future. Volume of data doesn't matter (to a certain point) if you seldom query that data. 1000TB of data that is neither queried nor updated doesn't require a database at all, for example.

So, as with all things engineering, it depends. You know you'll benefit from it if you can demonstrate that you'll benefit from it an that the effort/risk/etc. is lower than some other solution you could choose. If you're unable to determine this, you should bring in an expert who can.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#284

Post by btian »

jpmattia wrote: post #191
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…

> with the Availability being five 9s or better (less than one failure in 10^6) Anyone know how exactly this is defined for them? (Time? Queries? Results?)

In general availability is defined in terms of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability

Five-9s means 5 minutes of downtime per year.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#285

Post by dekhn »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #243
daveheq wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Google's cloud MySQL better than Oracle?

I didn't downvote you. It is important to note though that the Spanner project isn't related to MySQL and there is some discussion of that in a the stories around Spanner. It would nominally compete directly with Oracle's flagship database product.

Spanner is related to MySQL at Google: a product with Spanner's semantics was required to replace MySQL for some important business operations (https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/communication-a...)

it's actually hard to beat MySQL for a lot of things. i was skeptical about this when I joined google, but as an SRE on the MySQL team around this time, I gained a lot of respect for it.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#286

Post by adevine »

tedd4u wrote: post #33

The team here at Quizlet did a lot of performance testing on Spanner with one of our MySQL workloads to see if it's an option for us. Here are the test results: https://quizlet.com/blog/quizlet-cloud-spanner

Just wanted to say thanks for this writeup. This is really excellent, to the point I was passing around your blog post in lieu of the GCP announcement.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#287

Post by ex3ndr »

daenney wrote: post #161
ex3ndr wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So a query that accesses 10 rows in disparate parts of the primary key space will take longer than one where the keys reside on the same splits. This is expected with a distributed system. No, why? Query can be executed in parallel. BTW, isn't 20k/sec is a very very small performance for 30 node installation. Cassandra can handle 50k+ (both writes and read) on a single node. When in most queries you are trying to c…

I don't think that comparison holds. It's easy to push 50k+ on a single node, you're basically only resource bound on that machine. Pushing 20k+ on something that's globally consistent spread out over so many instances is a different exercise entirely. It also depends on the level of consistency you're asking from Cassandra. You'd probably need to set this to EACH_QUORUM or ALL to mimic the behaviour Spanner gives yo…

Sure, but you can make geo-replication and even implement proxy for providing consistency across DC, sure it won't be that fast in terms of latency, but throughput will be the same.

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#288

Post by stickfigure »

pramsey wrote: post #62
runeks wrote: post #27

I wonder why they charge a minimum of $0.90 per node-hour when they offer VMs for as little as $0.008/hr. This is hugely useful even for single-person startups, so why charge a minimum of ~$8,000 per year?

Concur. The pricing makes sense for their "target market" of folks who currently have a "bursting at the seams" MySQL or PgSQL instance, but it locks out folks just getting started with a tiny database and low load. This seems like bad positioning: the "bursting" folks will have to decide between the cost of re-hosting their whole system on the Cloud Spanner and trying to incrementally keep their current platform run…

This seems like a real problem. The "bursting at the seams" people will need a pretty significant rewrite to run on Spanner, which seriously limits the appeal.

The ideal market for Spanner seems to be new projects developed by big companies that know that big traffic will arrive on day 1. In other words, Google. Which I guess shouldn't be too surprising...

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#289

Post by mistermann »

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.

I'm not saying MS is going to abandon the platform, but to me it seems entirely possible that "very soon" these cloud platforms using cheap, shared, commodity hardware might be so affordable and technically capable that it might be a no brainer choice unless you have a very good reason to use MSSQL (kind of the opposite today, on-prem by default, cloud if necessary).

Re: Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

#290

Post by cobookman »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #253
cobookman wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Curious to know what are Netflix's needs for relational database? Doesn't strike me as a business with complex logic.

I'd assume they keep track of who watches what for their 'continue watching series...' pain.

Netflix was given as an example of scale. I guess for another example, spanner could be used to store every visa transaction

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