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This is a new one to me...the referenced paper is here: http://cs.yale.edu/homes/thomson/publications/calvin-sigmod1...

How does this algorithm compare to whatever Google Spanner does?

That's a good and complicated question. They both are fully ACID-compliant systems. The biggest difference as a developer is that Calvin never blocks reads, contested or not. You get causally consistent single-replica reads with no coordination.

This makes the read performance equivalent to something like Cassandra at CONSISTENCY.ONE, without giving up the cross-partition write linearization of something like Spanner.

Can Calvin scale beyond the OP claim?

I've personally seen a Cassandra ring go to more than 2M ops/sec.

Yes. This isn't near the top end, more like what happens when we run benchmarks on a reasonable web infrastructure class cluster. This is still only 5 machines in each datacenter.

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