View all pages: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/11/google-spanner-...

Also: > “We can commit data at two different locations — say the West Coast [of the United States] and Europe — and still have some agreed upon ordering between them,” Fikes says, “So, if the West Coast write happens first and then the one in Europe happens, the whole system knows that — and there’s no possibility of then being viewed in a different order.”

That's a large enough scale that you have to deal with relativity (light takes almost precisely 0.03 seconds to go from Palo Alto to Paris, eg). So in some sense there is no correct ordering. Anyone know how they deal with this? Have they just chosen some arbitrary point to make their reference frame, for purposes of ordering commits?