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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

If you're truly forward-thinking you'd start planning for multiplanetary databases. Get a leg up on the competition by the time humans reach Mars.

The core issues of planetary database systems have mostly been solved already. What about database systems which have to deal with time dilation due to running on spacecraft that travel through space at different velocities?

But in all seriousness, one of the core features missing in modern database systems is a way to smoothly handle tracking and deploying changes. Why are online schema changes so difficult?

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Humor aside, many years ago I had a 1:1 discussion with Vint Cerf (2003?) about interplanetary networks. He was thinking deeply on this topic, and I had some interesting and relevant input.

His focus was primarily on Store and Forward routing, and the implications that come with long latency hops. The overlap with military & battlefield networks where nodes are subject to active interference and "Node no longer exists" was a very overlapping topic.

A quick Google search shows he's still working on this.

Going further, I'd love to have a declarative schema for my database with some kind of hook layer to allow for data transformations between state. Or figure out how to eliminate the need to carry forward hundreds of schema migrations, such as an easier way to squash them periodically.

> What about database systems which have to deal with time dilation due to running on spacecraft that travel through space at different velocities?

I think they already handle this case by accident, because distributed clocks are unreliable and inconsistent anyways.

The Big Players put atomic clocks in the datacenter, and provide multiple mechanism's of time synchronization. Google Spanner was the first to do this, back in... 2007?

https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/26/3692392/google-spanner-a... https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-con...

Now, I don't think they worry overmuch about general or special relativity at this point, but if we start putting datacenters in orbit that will become an actual issue.

I'll wager we'll start seeing Edge Compute and CDN features on the very large satellite constellations (Starlink, etc) soon. Initially this will preserve bandwidth between satellites and with the ground stations. This will be a big upsell feature. The Quant folks would pay more for those sweet low-latency links...

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