Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database

James C. Corbett, Jeffrey Dean, Michael Epstein, Andrew Fikes, Christopher Frost, JJ Furman, Sanjay Ghemawat, Andrey Gubarev, Christopher Heiser, Peter Hochschild, Wilson Hsieh, Sebastian Kanthak, Eugene Kogan, Hongyi Li, Alexander Lloyd, Sergey Melnik, David Mwaura, David Nagle, Sean Quinlan, Rajesh Rao, Lindsay Rolig, Yasushi Saito, Michal Szymaniak, Christopher Taylor, Ruth Wang, Dale Woodford, Google, Inc.
Abstract Spanner is Google’s scalable, multi-version, globally- distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This paper describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set, the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty. This API and its implementation are critical to supporting external consistency and a variety of powerful features: non- blocking reads in the past, lock-free read-only transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner.
Published in the Proceedings of OSDI 2012.
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Alex Lloyd’stalkfrom Berlin Buzzwords 2012 about Google’s Spanner, Video

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