Authors: 

James C. Corbett, Jeffrey Dean, Michael Epstein, Andrew Fikes, Christopher Frost, JJ Furman, Sanjay Ghemawat, Andrey Gubarev, Christopher Heiser, Peter Hochschild, Wilson Hsieh, Sebastian Kanthak, Eugene Kogan, Hongyi Li, Alexander Lloyd, Sergey Melnik, David Mwaura, David Nagle, Sean Quinlan, Rajesh Rao, Lindsay Rolig, Yasushi Saito, Michal Szymaniak, Christopher Taylor, Ruth Wang, and Dale Woodford, Google, Inc.

Awarded Jay Lepreau Best Paper!

Abstract: 

Spanner is Google’s scalable, multi-version, globally distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This paper describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set, the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty. This API and its implementation are critical to supporting external consistency and a variety of powerful features: nonblocking reads in the past, lock-free read-only transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {180268,
author = {James C. Corbett and Jeffrey Dean and Michael Epstein and Andrew Fikes and Christopher Frost and JJ Furman and Sanjay Ghemawat and Andrey Gubarev and Christopher Heiser and Peter Hochschild and Wilson Hsieh and Sebastian Kanthak and Eugene Kogan and Hongyi Li and Alexander Lloyd and Sergey Melnik and David Mwaura and David Nagle and Sean Quinlan and Rajesh Rao and Lindsay Rolig and Yasushi Saito and Michal Szymaniak and Christopher Taylor and Ruth Wang and Dale Woodford},
title = {Spanner: {Google{\textquoteright}s} {Globally-Distributed} Database},
booktitle = {10th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 12)},
year = {2012},
isbn = {978-1-931971-96-6},
address = {Hollywood, CA},
pages = {261--264},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi12/technical-sessions/presentation/corbett},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}
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