Spanner: Google’s Globally Distributed Database

This research paper details Spanner, Google's globally-distributed database system. Spanner achieves strong consistency across its geographically dispersed data centers using a novel TrueTime API that accounts for clock uncertainty. The system features automatic sharding, failover, and a semi-relational data model, addressing limitations of previous systems like Bigtable and Megastore. Spanner's design is discussed in depth, including its architecture, concurrency control mechanisms, and performance benchmarks. A case study of its use in Google's advertising backend, F1, highlights its real-world applicability and benefits. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/spanner-osdi2012.pdf