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A comment on Why PostgreSQL High Availability Matters and How to Achieve It. Parent comment

Re:Why PostgreSQL High Availability Matters and How to Achie... by gen220 on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @02:13PM (#36330105)
Doesn't Spanner depend on access to globally-synchronized custom atomic clock hardware? i.e. even if it were open source, it wouldn't really be valuable unless you're a data center operator.

As I understand it, it's not a solved problem because there is no silver bullet, but rather trade-offs in every direction, and which solution works for you (including Spanner) is heavily dependent on your use case.

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Re:Why PostgreSQL High Availability Matters and How to Achie... by endisneigh on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @02:36PM (#36330508)
the clocks help but are not strictly required. FoundationDB also achieves external consistency without the clocks, but has limitations, such as a 5 second window for a transaction, due to optimistic concurrency.

the clocks remove such limitations.

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Re:Why PostgreSQL High Availability Matters and How to Achie... by roncesvalles on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @03:10PM (#36331003)
From my understanding, the only advantage of atomic clocks is that you can horizontally scale the sequence number generator because all these atomic clocks can operate independently and yet produce the same numbers at the same time (basically by tapping into the fabric of the universe).
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