Alexander Lloyd

Alexander Lloyd

Authored Publications
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    Spanner: Becoming a SQL System
    Nathan Bales
    Nico Bruno
    Brian F. Cooper
    Adam Dickinson
    Andrew Fikes
    Campbell Fraser
    Andrey Gubarev
    Milind Joshi
    Eugene Kogan
    Sergey Melnik
    Rajesh Rao
    Dave Shue
    Chris Taylor
    Marcel van der Holst
    Dale Woodford
    Proc. SIGMOD 2017, pp. 331-343 (to appear)
    Preview abstract Spanner is a globally-distributed data management system that backs hundreds of mission-critical services at Google. Spanner is built on ideas from both the systems and database communities. The first Spanner paper published at OSDI'12 focused on the systems aspects such as scalability, automatic sharding, fault tolerance, consistent replication, external consistency, and wide-area distribution. This paper highlights the database DNA of Spanner. We describe distributed query execution in the presence of resharding, query restarts upon transient failures, range extraction that drives query routing and index seeks, and the improved blockwise-columnar storage format. We touch upon migrating Spanner to the common SQL dialect shared with other systems at Google. View details
    Spanner: Google's Globally Distributed Database
    Michael Epstein
    Andrew Fikes
    Christopher Frost
    J. J. Furman
    Andrey Gubarev
    Christopher Heiser
    Sebastian Kanthak
    Eugene Kogan
    Hongyi Li
    Sergey Melnik
    David Mwaura
    David Nagle
    Rajesh Rao
    Lindsay Rolig
    Yasushi Saito
    Michal Szymaniak
    Christopher Taylor
    Ruth Wang
    Dale Woodford
    ACM Trans. Comput. Syst., 31 (2013), pp. 8
    Preview
    Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database
    Michael Epstein
    Andrew Fikes
    Christopher Frost
    JJ Furman
    Andrey Gubarev
    Christopher Heiser
    Peter Hochschild
    Sebastian Kanthak
    Eugene Kogan
    Hongyi Li
    Sergey Melnik
    David Mwaura
    David Nagle
    Rajesh Rao
    Lindsay Rolig
    Dale Woodford
    Yasushi Saito
    Christopher Taylor
    Michal Szymaniak
    Ruth Wang
    OSDI (2012)
    Preview abstract Spanner is Google's scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This paper describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set, the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty. This API and its implementation are critical to supporting external consistency and a variety of powerful features: non-blocking reads in the past, lock-free read-only transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner. View details
    Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services
    Jason Baker
    JJ Furman
    Andrey Khorlin
    James Larson
    Jean-Michel Leon
    Yawei Li
    Vadim Yushprakh
    Proceedings of the Conference on Innovative Data system Research (CIDR) (2011), pp. 223-234
    Preview abstract Megastore is a storage system developed to meet the requirements of today's interactive online services. Megastore blends the scalability of a NoSQL datastore with the convenience of a traditional RDBMS in a novel way, and provides both strong consistency guarantees and high availability. We provide fully serializable ACID semantics within fine-grained partitions of data. This partitioning allows us to synchronously replicate each write across a wide area network with reasonable latency and support seamless failover between datacenters. This paper describes Megastore's semantics and replication algorithm. It also describes our experience supporting a wide range of Google production services built with Megastore. View details