Spanner: Google’s Globally Distributed Database

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 talk will discuss a paper that 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, lockfree snapshot transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner.

Here is a link to the paper: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-research2023-media/pubtools/1974.pdf