[mrtracy]

Post author here:

In terms of Google products, CockroachDB much more closely resembles a combination Spanner (http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html) and F1 (http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41344.html). However, while we do share many traits with these systems (a consistently replicated, transactional key/value store with a SQL interface), our internal transactional model is actually quite different.

If you're interested in some of the papers that inspired CockroachDB's transactional model, we have mentioned a number of them in our design doc (https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/de...).

As for Percolator, that system is not a general purpose database but an "incremental processor" for large datasets (such as a web crawler). While it does use a snapshot transaction system internally, it appears to use real exclusive access locks, which CockroachDB does not use. Our write intents are not locks, because they do not guarantee exclusive access to a resource (I've expanded on this in another comment on the blog: http://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-cockroachdb-distribute...)

We are not claiming our transaction model to be exceptionally novel, this post is just trying to shed light on a specific property of that model.