Introduction to Spanner

A history of distributed databases

It was a system designer’s dream to build a globally distributed database with all the good features of a traditional relational database like strong consistency, ability to do complex transactions, consistent snapshots, and many more. However, achieving the features above with good performance and high availability proved hard. In pursuit of that dream, we had many different kinds of NoSQL databases.

We had a significant leap forward in realizing this dream with Google’s Spanner system. It is interesting how Spanner controlled the skew on clocks and utilized high-quality network infrastructure, to provide a globally distributed database with strongly consistent reads and writes. We will study this fascinating innovation in this chapter in detail.