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Spanner didn’t exist in 2012.

Maybe, but this 2010 presentation mentions it.

https://cloud.google.com/files/storage_architecture_and_chal...

at that time, only aristocrats could use spanner.

Yes it did. Google published a paper about it in 2012, and claimed that at that point it had been in development for 5 years and in production for more than 1.

Mmm, I worked at google in 2012 and F1 was in active development.

I’ve never heard of Spanner internally. Maybe it was in development, but it was not in use.

Edit: went and read more. Looks like Spanner existed but didn’t have sql, so it wasn’t what it is today. And looks like I don’t remember things any more.

at least by 2013 it had some basic SQL (although much more limited subset that one usable today); if you needed more you would be using f1; IIRC I used spanner (without F1) in production around 2013

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