
Why Google’s Spanner Database Won’t Do as Well as Its Clone - Katydid
https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/02/15/googles-spanner-database-wont-well-clone/
======
stuckagain
I'm used to reading inaccurate descriptions of Google and Googlers in the
press, so I wasn't surprised by this from the article:

"... be usable as a single database for Google’s developers, who could care
less about how a database or datastore is architected and implemented so long
as it gets closer and closer to the SQL-based relational database that is the
foundation of enterprise computing."

I don't think I've ever heard a less accurate description of Google engineers.
The idea of implementing anything at Google scale on top of an enterprise-
style SQL database would be vociferously shouted down by the vast majority of
Googlers.

And the rest of the article is pretty much a mess without a discernible point.

~~~
duskwuff
> "... be usable as a single database for Google’s developers, who could care
> less about how a database or datastore is architected and implemented so
> long as it gets closer and closer to the SQL-based relational database that
> is the foundation of enterprise computing."

There's more than that worse with this quote. The whole thing is predicated on
the concept that a "SQL-based relational database" is some sort of Platonic
ideal of databases, and that all worthwhile databases must be an approximation
of that ideal. This could hardly be farther from the truth -- there are plenty
of successful NoSQL databases out there already, and one gets the sense that
Spanner's SQL support is largely a compatibility layer on top of a very
different underlying database.

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placeybordeaux
This article doesn't seem to say why spanner won't do as well as it's clone.

~~~
duskwuff
"Its clone" \-- what clone?! Spanner has only barely been announced. It's
incredibly premature for an article to start making claims about a "clone" of
Spanner, when we haven't even seen anything about Spanner yet beyond marketing
information.

~~~
wmf
Spanner was announced in 2012; Cloud Spanner was announced this week. The
clone is CockroachDB and has been in the works for a few years.

~~~
duskwuff
Wow, OK. The article didn't make that part very clear at all -- I assumed they
were talking about a hypothetical future clone, not one that already existed.
:/

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powera
> But what would the world look like if the search engine giant had started
> selling capacity on its vast infrastructure back in 2005, before Amazon Web
> Services launched, and then shortly thereafter started selling capacity on
> its high level platform services?

What if Google did start selling capacity on its vast infrastructure in 2008,
and we got Snapchat as a result?

> To put it bluntly, it would have been more interesting to see Google endorse
> CockroachDB and support it on Cloud Platform

To put it bluntly, no.

And he never even attempts to answer the question in his headline.

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malkia
Honestly, I did not understand what this article talks about. I was expecting
something along these lines (at least): [https://quizlet.com/blog/quizlet-
cloud-spanner](https://quizlet.com/blog/quizlet-cloud-spanner)

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nickpsecurity
I can tell you why it will: stability. A post here a while back showed
CockroachDB just recently started focusing on it where F1 RDBMS and Spanner
have been running large workloads reliably at Google for some time now. I have
high hopes for CockroachDB but Spanner has a lead here for now. Plus it's
available so an ecosystem will start forming.

~~~
harigov
Keep in mind that once something is accomplished, it's not too long before
other companies do the same as well. I see no reason why Azure/AWS can't do
the same in next few years. If that gives Google an edge, great! But it won't
be for too long.

~~~
knicholes
I'm not sure, but it looks like maybe AWS already has...
[https://aws.amazon.com/rds/](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/)

~~~
daenney
You can't compare that to Spanner. RDS is a product that helps you
manage/scale something like MySQL for you. It would compare to CloudSQL in the
Google portfolio.

However, they have their own database engine called Aurora, which is what you
actually get when you select MySQL or Postgres for RDS and provides much
better throughput and replication behaviour. You can also only have up to 15
Aurora replicas whereas Spanner goes far far beyond that.

~~~
bdcravens
Aurora uses a MySQL-compliant API, but non-Aurora MySQL RDS instances are not
using Aurora. Those instances are just managed MySQL. Ditto for Postgres
(Aurora Postgres is in closed beta)

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niranjan92
its more of a clickbait and doesn't talk anything about Google's clone. I
wonder how it made to the front page of HN

