Re:Cloud Spanner is now production-ready
by timelol on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @03:42PM
(#14352626)
Using GPS as your time source is a fabulously good way to trash your entire database during a leap second. See this paper for a discussion on how essentially everybody but Google gets this wrong: http://crin.eng.uts.edu.au/~darryl/Publications/LeapSecond_c...
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GPS time does not have leap seconds:
http://www.oc.nps.edu/oc2902w/gps/timsys.html
> GPS Time is a uniformly counting time scale ... The word "uniformly" is used above to indicate that there are no "leap seconds" in this time system.
> The GPS message contains information that allows a receiver to convert GPS Time into Universal Time
In fact the article you linked corroborates this, because they used GPS time to show how inaccurate NTP servers are.