ACID correct distributed transactions are possible. Google's F1 paper shows how: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Very, very painful problems are very, very valuable.
Very, very painful problems are very, very valuable.
Google falls under the "absurd amount of money" camp.
> Protocol Buffers have performance implications for query processing. First, we always have to fetch entire Protocol Buffer columns from Spanner, even when we are only interested in a small subset of fields.
There are a number of performance costs documented in the paper. Simply because you can solve it via money doesn't mean it works for all situations.