I don't think Spanner is one of these fake-relational databases, it's an ACID datastore that's used as underlying storage for the real RDBMS F1. From the F1 pa

I don't think Spanner is one of these fake-relational databases, it's an ACID datastore that's used as underlying storage for the real RDBMS F1. From the F1 paper (http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38125.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38125.html) It looks like it's mostly intended as an improvement to sharded MySQL, by putting the sharding where it belongs, down at the physical storage level, instead of up at the client access level. Maybe a better buzzword would be NoMySQL (NOracle?)