An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
The first question I asked Fauna was the one they always get: does the world need another cloud database?
The answer, it seems is yes. The reason, however, is somewhat technical.
The story goes back to the battle between two competing theoretical approaches to building database consensus at scale: Spanner, a Google-driven initiative, and Calvin, a more theoretical approach developed by a team at Yale.
In the battle between Google vs. Yale, Google clearly played the role of the hare to Calvin’s tortoise. As with the Aesop tale, however, Spanner had a limitation that turned out to be a weakness: it required synchronized atomic clocks across global data centers.
Google, of course, had the wherewithal to deploy and manage such hardware, but given the pesky speed of light, enterprise hybrid IT priorities, and other tricky issues, Calvin-based approaches gradually caught up to the hare.
Fauna is one of the first commercial implementations of the Calvin technology, which even Fauna admits is extraordinarily difficult to get right. But while ACID transactionality has always required two-phase commits, Calvin enables Fauna to achieve this gold standard of transactionality with a single phase.
The result: a distributed, cloud-based, infinitely scalable database with the high availability and fault tolerance that even the toughest transactional systems – think core banking – a requirement met with no clocks necessary.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Cortex newsletter, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.
