Spencer Kimball Pt 1: Consistent Synchronous Replication

<p>I enjoyed learning about how Cockroach is leaderless and synchronous and that makes it a lot more resilient than alternatives.</p><p>Audio source: <a href="https://changelog.com/founderstalk/75">https://changelog.com/founderstalk/75</a></p><p>Spanner paper: <a href="https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/spanner-osdi2012.pdf">https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/spanner-osdi2012.pdf</a></p><p>Share/Comment via Tweet: <a href="https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1376470276918050818">https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1376470276918050818</a></p><p><strong>Adam Stacoviak: </strong>[00:00:00] So when did you encounter the problem that you're solving today? </p><p><strong>Spencer Kimball: </strong>[00:00:04] Yeah, so databases it turns out that they have been extraordinarily central in my career. Back as early as the.com startup. I did, we go systems we built sharded, Oracle and sharded Postgres as the two sort of flavors we supported. And I got to tell you when I was at Berkeley, I wasn't very interested in databases.</p><p>I mentioned graphics. That was really. Probably my key interest databases. I didn't take until my first and only year of grad school. And I just kinda took it to get some credits. I ended up being pretty interested in the course, but I didn't really think they'd be central to my career. But as soon as I hit the quote, unquote, real world databases became a central problem of big source of frustration at Wego.</p><p>And then when I got to Google, that was one of the first projects that got thrown onto, which was the AdWords system, which you know, was nascent then in 2002. But it was running into problems with sharded, my SQL. And you hear this word, "sharded", but it really, you know, for listeners that aren't aware of what that implies it's, it's about taking a monolithic database like Postgres or my SQL or Oracle that really is meant for you know, a single machine.</p><p>Even if that machine can be quite large and you