F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales

F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales.
Authors: Jeff Shute, Radek Vingralek, Eric Rollins, Stephan Ellner, Traian Stancescu, Bart Samwel, Mircea Oancea,
John Cieslewicz, Himani Apte, Ben Handy, Kyle Littlefield, Ian Rae*.
Google, Inc.
*University of Wisconsin-Madison

ABSTRACT
F1 is a distributed relational database system built at Google to support the AdWords business. F1 is a hybrid database that combines high availability, the scalability of NoSQL systems like Bigtable, and the consistency and us- ability of traditional SQL databases. F1 is built on Span- ner, which provides synchronous cross-datacenter replica- tion and strong consistency. Synchronous replication im- plies higher commit latency, but we mitigate that latency by using a hierarchical schema model with structured data types and through smart application design. F1 also in- cludes a fully functional distributed SQL query engine and automatic change tracking and publishing.

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