[marknadal]

Warning, this is a very dangerous practice. The whole point of the article states that machines do fail and that networks are unreliable. He had a specific section in their that even Spanner has a 7ms uncertainty on time.

Therefore: You CANNOT trust timestamps or your clock.

[xxxyy]

Yes, I know. This is a thought experiment, as there is really no such thing as perfectly synchronized clocks.

Also despite the need for futuristic clocks the system lacks resistance to failure (no heartbeat from arbitrary node -> no transaction gets commited and no transaction gets aborted -> a deadlock). Maybe this is fixable with Paxos, I'm not sure.