3 ms·
Nobody in industry understood how to apply Calvin until we did at Fauna. That is the only reason; the rest is engineering path dependence.
by evanweaver 7y ago
Nobody in industry understood how to apply Calvin until we did at Fauna. That is the only reason; the rest is engineering path dependence.
- aboodman 7y agoif you don’t mind sharing, I’m curious to learn more what was the main challenge was applying Calvin. Thanks!
- evanweaver 7y agoSee @freels’ reply above. I think it is fair to say that the Calvin paper is visibly incomplete and expresses some constraints in a way that makes them seem insurmountable when they are not; specifically, they are only constraints within the log, but do not constrain the database experience overall. Applying Calvin to traditional RDBMS workloads was a very unlikely creative exercise because it required questioning these explicit constraints. The Spanner paper also leaves a lot unexplained, but it is less obvious until you are too far down the path to turn back. After all, it worked for Google. Calvin did not have that real-world proof. Combine that with the pessimism of the paper itself and nobody was willing to pick it up.