NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blame Spanner

Re:NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blam... by mmt on Friday September 21, 2018 @08:35PM (#18043774)

I'm not sure anyone would ever actually have only one machine, without a failover option, and failing over had better not bring down the whole system.

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Re:NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blam... by yjftsjthsd-h on Friday September 21, 2018 @10:32PM (#18044137)

But now we're back to a distributed system

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Re:NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blam... by mmt on Saturday September 22, 2018 @01:16AM (#18044583)

I don't think that's true, in the usual sense of the term.

When a replica is used as a read slave, that introduces problems with (strong) consistency, that definitely starts to resemble any other distributed system.

Adding automated failover adds the need for some kind of consensus algorithm, another feature of distributed systems.

However, if failover is manual, for example, then 2 nodes can be nearly indistinguishable from 1 node, if no failover occurs.

It also strains the definition of "distributed" if both nodes are adjacent, possibly even with direct network and/or storage connections to each other.

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