[rebelos]

I don't quite understand why, but much of the tech industry seems to be sleeping on Cloud Spanner. Google quietly completely revolutionized managed+consistent+available+scalable RDBMS and very few people seem to have caught on yet. Maybe it's too much of a threat to job security?

[blaisio]

I agree spanner and cockroach are the future. Most people don't need a database that can scale that well, and spanner is too expensive to use unless you really truly need it. Also, google and cockroach have not done enough marketing. Look at all the marketing mongodb did - they actually managed to convince people to use a database that would regularly lose data.

[rebelos]

You can get 3 nodes for about $27k a year and that'll handle 30k read QPS and in the neighborhood 1-2k write QPS iirc. It's a fraction of the cost of even a single dedicated engineer. And you'd probably need several engineers to achieve the same perf with open source alternatives and keep it stable/upright. There's a large class of businesses for which this choice is a no-brainer.

[manigandham]

Is Cloud Spanner the only managed option? Why would you compare to a dedicated engineer?

AWS RDS or GCP Cloud SQL or Azure Managed SQL or IBM Compose or Aiven or any number of other vendors offer managed databases with more features, much higher performance, and far less cost. Even CRDB has its own cloud offering that's cheaper and more flexible than Spanner.

[rebelos]

Your answer suggests that you don't fully understand what problems Spanner is solving and why it's worth paying for that. CRDB is improving but I don't think it's consensus production-grade quite yet.

[manigandham]

You compared it to open-sources databases and having a full-time engineer (while overlooking managed solutions). If those problems were unsolvable by other systems then what exactly were you comparing?

Spanner isn't magic, it's just a proprietary distributed relational database that is strongly consistent (CP) and relies on Google's network and infrastructure to make up for availability as much as possible. CRDB solves the same problems. It was founded by ex-googlers who are familiar with Spanner and the product is production-grade enough to achieve a multi-billion dollar valuation with impressive customers. Plenty of "new-sql" relational datastores have been created that compete and win on both features and cost, because the reality is that the vast majority of companies do not have a scaling problem; certainly not one that can only be solved by Spanner.

[rebelos]

I'm not disagreeing that CRDB will likely get there, but people are still reporting various issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23087071.

It does seem however like you appreciate why Spanner and CRDB are important steps forward. The prices will continue to come down. It will become a de facto sensible solution in production for any reasonably well-capitalized business in the future.

[jd_mongodb]

If you are aware of anyone who has lost data using MongoDB we would love to hear about it. There have been many examples of constructed scenarios where we a MongoDB cluster can be demonstrated to have lost data and in every case we have fixed those bugs. We take data loss very seriously. If you know of such a data loss instance please make contact.

[manigandham]

Spanner is great for Google, and other companies at the scale of Google. For the other 99% of companies, it's way too expensive, with too much lock-in (even SQL-based DML is a new addition), and has too many limitations.

There are dozens of managed database vendors now along with self-service deployments like Kubernetes operators that can scale standard databases as far as you need.

[jahewson]

It’s way too expensive. Plus I wouldn’t want to deal with the limitations and latency that its consistency model brings unless I had truly Google-scale data, which I don’t.