Wow! We at GenieDB have been working on a geo-distributed, multi-datacenter, relational database engine for some time. We’ve believed in this vision of providing distributed RDBMS/SQL database, but had to endure the NoSQL movement and other attempts at refuting the need for such a thing. One whitepaper and what a big difference it makes!
The Spanner whitepaper does just as good a job as any marketing speak of describing what we are after. “Even though many projects happily use Bigtable, we have also consistently received complaints from users that Bigtable can be difficult to use for some kinds of applications: those that have complex, evolving schemas, or those that want strong consistency in the presence of wide-area replication. … …
[Read more]