[andras_gerlits]

Almost there Dustin, thank you. This article is about the mental model behind scaling consistency across arbitrary geographical distances and how this model allows us to communicate time-information the same way we now communicate data. It's an intro to the science-paper, not the implementation.

With regards to the implementation (which is omniledger.io): We basically make SQL scale via Kafka by piggybacking on the semantics of both technologies.

There's no central authority for any of the tables. The version-ledger is totally schema-agnostic, only the clients understand it. In fact, it federates schemas the same way it does records. Tables are not topics either, in fact, we scale by importing namespaces via a command-line interface, which specifies a schema. Any database can register to this namespace after which they become as much of the "master" to the namespace as any other. There's no hierarchy between them, the ledger does everything for them. Since the ledger itself is deterministically replicated, a separate instance of it can be co-located with each instance that runs the JDBC-connections to the database, raising availability of it to the availability of the whole system. Each component in the setup scales with the number of partitions created for it.