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My take away is that it depends on your requirements. If most of your transactions are multi-entity, then Calvin-like is better. If most of your transactions are single-entity, then Spanner-like is better.

I implemented projects in GAE Datastore, though it's classic Paxos inside, it's clearly multi-partition database. For my workflow almost all of the frequqnt transactions were single-entity, so multi-partition Datastore worked fine with it.

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I think that's a fair takeaway specifically because you are careful to limit the scope of your comparison to Calvin and Spanner. If you were to replace "Spanner-like" with "partitioned", I'd push back that it's not as clear Calvin is better than non-Spanner partitioned systems, even when you have mostly multi-entity transactions.

EDIT: To be clear, when I say better I mean higher throughput and lower latency.

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