Hacker News Reader

Comment by karlding | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how this will affect adoption of CockroachDB [1], which was inspired by Spanner and supposedly an open source equivalent. I'd imagine that Spanner is a rather compelling choice, since they don't have to host it themselves. As far as I know, CockroachDB currently does not support providing CockroachDB as a service (but it is on their roadmap) [2].

[1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-question...

[2] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-question...

View on HN

(Cockroach Labs CTO here)

Google launching Spanner is generally a positive thing for our industry and our product. It's more proof that what we're aiming for is possible and that there's demand for it. We expect that in five years, all tech companies will be deploying technology like ours.

One of the big differences is that Spanner only uses SQL for read-only operations, with a custom API for writes. We use standard SQL for both reads and writes, which means we also work with major ORMs like GORM, SQLAlchemy, and Hibernate (docs should be live today or tomorrow). Spanner's custom write API will make it difficult to work with existing frameworks, or to convert an existing application to Spanner.

Cloud Spanner only works on Google Cloud and is a black-box managed service. CockroachDB is open source and can be run on-prem or in any cloud on commodity hardware. (We don't offer CockroachDB as a service yet, but may in the future)

At this point, both products are still in beta and are still missing features like back-up and restore (according to the Quizlet blog post). We plan to launch CockroachDB 1.0 with back-up / restore enabled.

* For anyone wanting to know more about how we make CockroachDB work without TrueTime, see our blog post: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clo...

Exciting times on the horizon for Cloud technologies. Godspeed.

I for one would love to see a hosted offering of cockroachdb!

> Google launching Spanner is generally a positive thing for our industry and our product. It's more proof that what we're aiming for is possible and that there's demand for it. We expect that in five years, all tech companies will be deploying technology like ours. Echo on this! It's truly exciting moment for each and everyone in the field.

Would Cockroach 1.0 comply with SQL:2011?

(CockroachDB CTO here) We haven't implemented everything in the standard yet (Nor will we by 1.0 - there's a lot of stuff there!), but we are aiming to ultimately be compliant with the SQL standard. For example, when we introduced "time travel queries" (https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/time-travel-queries-selec...) we adopted the SQL-standard syntax "AS OF SYSTEM TIME" (as opposed to the non-standard out-of-band parameter used in Cloud Spanner)

The main sales pitch of Cloud Spanner is Google's network infrastructure.

No startup will be able to replicate that anytime soon, a lot of time (and money) has been put into it by a lot of people over a long time.

Curious: is there any company in the world that could replicate its breadth, performance, and reliability in the next decade?

Could any government? Has any government?

My impression is that, infrastructure wise, Google is genuinely in a class of size one.

Its probably a class size of 2, with Amazon. Beyond those two though, no one else is close.

I honestly don't think Amazon is even close to Google.

How much more infrastructure do they have besides AWS? How much does Google have besides GCP?

That's ignoring just how much larger AWS is than GCP.

Sure, but those are the public offerings - the largest part of Google's infrastructure is not public.

Capital expenditures might shed some light on this. I don't think there's enough public data to be clear but in 2015 Amazon (4.8B), Google (9.9B) and Microsoft (5.9B) were at least on the same order of magnitude in terms of CapEx, whereas other major "datacenter" companies like Rackspace (475M) are much smaller.

I don't think you can draw any definitive conclusions from this, but calling it a class of size 1 or 2 is probably an overstatement of Google (+/- Amazon)'s advantage over Microsoft at least.

Ever heard of Facebook ? :)

What? Close to what? There are many many companies with lots of network infrastructure. Google and Amazon are not by themselves.

AWS, they just don't talk publicly about it so much.

> Could any government?

NSA's annual budget is $50bn. U.S. military budget is about $600bn.

Google's revenue is $90bn and they don't spend all of it.

https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clo...

> A simple statement of the contrast between Spanner and CockroachDB would be: Spanner always waits on writes for a short interval, whereas CockroachDB sometimes waits on reads for a longer interval. How long is that interval? Well it depends on how clocks on CockroachDB nodes are being synchronized. Using NTP, it’s likely to be up to 250ms. Not great, but the kind of transaction that would restart for the full interval would have to read constantly updated values across many nodes. In practice, these kinds of use cases exist but are the exception.

CockroachDB is waiting for time keeping hardware to improve.

Eric Brewer's post on Cloud Spanner mentioned that Google intends to expose TrueTime to customers at some point. If/when that happens, it would be very interesting to see CockroachDB's performance on Google Cloud. (They might have to do some engineering work to accomodate whatever TrueTime API is exposed, but when timekeeping is fundamental to your product, that seems worthwhile.)

If the clock offset is too high (more than 250ms), we should use another transaction model, Google Percolator is a good fit before the unforeseeable improvement in the hardware. Based on the monitoring of clock offset on cloud, TiDB chose to use the timestamp oracle to allocate timestamp, which is much faster.

Maybe you could help fund Eric S. Raymond to improve NTPD, he might have some good ideas about improving normal PC-class hardware cheaply too.

https://www.ntpsec.org/

CockroachDB can be hosted on any cloud for a fraction of the cost, I'd think that's a huge advantage for small/solo startups.

Given that Spanner starts at $650/mo/node + storage costs, I think Cockroach could still see huge usage as a self-hosted alternative.

That's not very much given the capabilities and managed service. Anything cheaper probably means the single-node managed SQL offerings are more than enough.

But single node with unlimited room to grow is always a good value prop. Cockroach can market that, but Spanner can't.

I imagine the globally distributed database market is big enough for more than one winner. The presence of competitors can sometimes even be a boon, increasing the visibility of a market's goods relative to other similar goods.

And assuming some reasonable compatibility/portability/migration story it can help in reducing the rational fear of proprietary lock-in.

I am also interested in how it compares to NewSQL databases like NuoDB. NuoDB has been positioning itself as a very similar type solution (no compromise relational distributed database) to Cloud Spanner for a while (minus the cloud hardware provided for you).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com