| This is actually exciting. Most sales pitches for secret sauce services are much flimsier and don't ooze the actual technical possibilities and promises that this one does. So, does it solve the double-spend problem or not? The prose is a bit ambiguous on that. I don't want to work that out for myself. I want to be told one way or another, and perhaps given some simple examples like "users x and y both want to do z at roughly the same time; depending on several factors like the exact timings and network latencies, there are several outcomes. They are..." etc. And of course we want to know what kind of realistic throughput and latency it gets, how easy it is to add and remove POPs (and what data gets lost when you do), etc. Finally, it really needs to commission and publish a Jepsen analysis. Hasn't every database vendor learned how critical that is to winning the programming public's heart? This seems to be a startup who is going to sell it as a service, and I hope them all the best. The DB world is full of better tech that didn't make the dent it technically deserved (hyperdex, tokudb, perhaps rethink etc) so a new startup has to be both vocal and embrace Jepsen from the beginning. I think HN is ripe for a new darling and whichever company becomes that darling might capture a lot of the ill-informed web-scale-before-we-have-a-customer market ;) |
Yes it does solve the double spend - it let’s you mark (check box) a collection with a SPOT property (single point of truth) which restricts the number of edge region that collection is replicated across. Additionally the spot collection is replicated across two separate data centers (and separate availability zones in those data centers) to provide high availability. The developer doesn’t need to deal with the complexity of where and how this is done - they continue to access the collection like a regular one and the DB will redirect the queries (and do things like joins) between the regular and spot collection.
I’m writing a faq and will include your questions there.
Jepsen is in the plans - we hope to get a report out in the summer.