Google announced on February 6, 2026 that its open‑source SQL analysis framework ZetaSQL will be renamed GoogleSQL to unify the project name with the official language spec, eliminate community confusion, and clarify its role in the Google data ecosystem without changing any code or functionality.
Google Cloud Spanner now offers a policy‑driven hierarchical storage tier that moves infrequently accessed data to cheap HDDs, reducing costs by up to 80% while keeping SQL queries seamless across SSD and HDD layers and preserving backup consistency.
This article explains what NewSQL databases are, outlines their core characteristics, reviews major products such as Spanner, CockroachDB, TiDB, OceanBase and TDSQL, and discusses typical use cases ranging from financial services to HTAP workloads.
Distributed transactions require careful coordination to maintain consistency across multiple nodes, and this article explores core concepts such as atomic operations, two‑phase and three‑phase commit protocols, deterministic Calvin ordering, Google Spanner’s TrueTime and Paxos‑based approach, as well as advanced techniques like Percolator, RAMP, and coordination avoidance.
This article explains the concept of linearizability, contrasts it with serializability, and describes how Google Spanner uses the TrueTime API and commit‑wait mechanisms to provide external consistency and reliable snapshot reads in a globally distributed database system.
This article debunks humorous "facts" about Jeff Dean while highlighting his real contributions to Google’s infrastructure—such as MapReduce, the Google File System, BigTable, and Spanner—and explains how his work shaped modern backend development and big data processing.
