Databases

Storing and querying data with real guarantees: transactions, replication, and consistency held across many machines — how a distributed SQL database keeps its promises at scale.

Explainers

• How Google Spanner Works — A SQL database that spans the planet and still behaves as if every transaction ran one at a time. The trick is TrueTime — a clock that hands back an interval, not an instant, so a committing transaction can wait out its own uncertainty. We walk the splits and Paxos groups, the commit-wait rule that buys external consistency, how reads and writes scale, and when you do not need any of it — drawn, computed, and animated.