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Comment by placeybordeaux | Hacker News Reader

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

I think it's implied in the disappointment that Spanner isn't open source:

"To put it bluntly, it would have been more interesting to see Google endorse CockroachDB and support it on Cloud Platform, creating an open source community as well as a cloud service for its Cloud Platform customers."

CockroachDB will presumably do better in the author's eyes because it's open source and there can be a real community built around it.

Well that article was FAR too long then.

"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.

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.

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. :/

CockroachDB is referred to as the clone here. They once gave a talk literally titled "Towards an Open-Source Spanner" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndKj77VW2eM), so I don't believe that's an unfair characterization.

It's CockroachDB. The guys who created Spanner just left (the clone) called Cockroach Labs.

The Spanner paper was published in 2012 on the Google Research site. It describes the entire system. We know a lot about the internals beyond marketing information.

https://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html

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