Whitepapers

• Spanner: Becoming a SQL System (SIGMOD 2017)

  This paper highlights the database DNA of Spanner. It describes distributed query execution in the presence of resharding, query restarts upon transient failures, range extraction that drives query routing and index seeks, and the improved blockwise-columnar storage format.

• Spanner, TrueTime, and the CAP Theorem

  How Spanner provides scale, ACID transactions, high availability, and low latency.

• Life of Spanner Reads and Writes

  How writes and reads work in Spanner and how Spanner ensures strong consistency.

• Life of a Spanner Query

  How Spanner supports SQL queries.

• Optimizing Schema Design for Spanner

  How to model your data to ensure that your application can scale and perform as it grows in various dimensions.

• Spanner: Google's Globally Distributed Database (OSDI 2012)

  This paper describes the systems aspects of Spanner, such as scalability, automatic sharding, fault tolerance, consistent replication, external consistency, and wide-area distribution.

• Failure scenarios and resiliency with Spanner

  Explore the different failure scenarios of Spanner categorized into three levels of severity–including when operating outside of Google Cloud.

• How chaos testing adds extra reliability to Spanner's fault-tolerant design

  How Spanner uses chaos testing, the process of deliberately injecting faults into production-like instances of the database.