Spanner: Google's globally distributed database
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 2013•dl.acm.org
Spanner is Google's scalable, multiversion, globally distributed, and synchronously
replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support
externally-consistent distributed transactions. This article 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: nonblocking reads in the …
replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support
externally-consistent distributed transactions. This article 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: nonblocking reads in the …
Spanner is Google’s scalable, multiversion, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This article 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: nonblocking reads in the past, lock-free snapshot transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner.
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