TiDB – a global scale distributed DB
From their blog: &quot;TiKV is a distributed key-value database. It is the core component of the TiDB project and is the open source implementation of Google Spanner.&quot; I think the Cockroach DB guys would take offence at that.<p>So how do they use a Spanner-like design without specialized hardware? I had to really dig but the answer is &quot;We are using the Timestamp Allocator introduced in Percolator, a paper published by Google in 2006. The pros of using the Timestamp Allocator are its easy implementation and no dependency on any hardware. The disadvantage lies in that if there are multiple datacenters, especially if these DCs are geologically distributed, the latency is really high.&quot;<p>Using Spanner&#x27;s design but without the real hardware that makes it practical seems like a step backward. A Calvin[1] based approach like FaunaDB would probably have been better - but they can&#x27;t do that and still have MySQL compatibility (you can&#x27;t do interactive client-server transactions with Calvin.)<p>I&#x27;m skeptical of a database built over a generic KV-store. There was a much-hyped database a few years ago that failed to live up to the hype because of exactly that architecture. I can&#x27;t even remember the name now when I was trying to find the post-mortem analysis for it in Google.<p>I&#x27;m also skeptical of a database claiming to be good at both OLAP and OLTP. One requires a column store, the other a row store. You can be half-decent as an OLAP store and good as a OLTP store. There are no column-stores that are also good at OLTP. But OLAP is the real big-data problems of today, and using half-decent for that is likely to get you in trouble. There&#x27;s no reason a database can&#x27;t do both by using two separate storage engines under the hood, but that doesn&#x27;t seem to be the case here.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fauna.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;distributed-consistency-at-scale-spanner-vs-calvin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fauna.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;distributed-consistency-at-scale-span...</a>