Spanner Paper (2012)
← Back to Key Papers to Read
“Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database” (2012) — Corbett et al.
Introduced the first globally distributed database with strong external consistency using TrueTime (atomic clocks + GPS). Key contributions: TrueTime API for globally meaningful timestamps, Paxos-based replication, and SQL semantics at global scale. Inspired CockroachDB and YugabyteDB. Became Cloud Spanner on GCP.
Related
google-internal papers spanner #2012