Daniel Chia
Senior Software Engineer, Google Spanner Grade Team Lead, Google Spanner Senior Software…. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
1shows
1appearances
15statements
9resolved
7supported
1contradicted
78%fully supported
Everything Daniel Chia said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Chia: Shard granularity is exceptionally difficult to alter post-implementation
“Once you shard by a certain level of granularity, it's very hard to redesign your system to try and think about it a different way.”
Chia: Google Spanner eliminates operational differences between and within shards
“And in Spanner, it's a little bit nicer in that every shard behaves the same, and because we have technologies like, ah, two-phase commit, We are, you don't really have any difference between operating within a shard or across shards, but it's not always true …”
Daniel Chia: Sharding database tables purely by entity keys risks giant hot shards
“The problem here is that, you know, one day you're going to get some singer that's so popular and so prolific and has so many songs that That one singer shard is gonna be huge, and then you are kind of in trouble, right? You either need to do a lot of special …”
Daniel Chia: Row-based sharding can outperform dynamic range sharding for uniformly random workloads
“In fact, this is a case where one of the earlier methods of sharding just by row would potentially work better, because if your incoming new workload is just randomly Distributed across rows perfectly. It will distribute across all the shards very well.”
Google Spanner provides full SQL capabilities and transaction guarantees across shards
“Between shards, You still have full transaction guarantees and full SQL capabilities. In a lot of SQL sharding schemes, you, within charts, you have full SQL capabilities, but across charts, there's no such thing.”
Google Spanner handles petabytes of data and tens of millions of QPS
“The mission critical database for Google, it supports hundreds of Google applications, including Google AdWords and Google Play, and we manage, you know, petabytes of data and have tens of millions of QPS every day.”
Google Spanner synchronously replicates data across data centers using Paxos
“What's special about Spanner is that it's able to synchronously replicate data between different data centers using algorithms such as Paxos and two-phase commit.”
Chia: Google Spanner uses TrueTime technology to assign global timestamps
“We use this technology called TrueTime, which allows us to get an estimate of what is the exact accurate time anywhere in the world to assign a unique timestamp to every transaction that Spanner processes.”
Chia: Spanner provides external consistency for concurrent transactions
“This allows us to offer developers a consistency model called external consistency, where even though Spanner might be processing hundreds of transactions concurrently they all appear to have committed In serial order according to their timestamp.”
Chia: Location services allow dynamic database sharding over hardcoding
“The really nice thing about having a location service is that you can adaptively change your shards rather than having to hard code it upfront.”
Chia: All Spanner RPCs address specific data rather than machine names
“All RPCs in Spanner are addressed to specific pieces of data rather than the machine name.”
Daniel Chia: Dynamic sharding systems struggle to quickly adapt to sudden workload shifts
“One of the biggest problems you can face with a dynamic sharding system is that it takes a while for us to adapt to your workload.”
Google Spanner provides ACID transactions and SQL semantics
“Well, Spanner is Google's relational database. It has asset semantics and SQL, sorry, asset transactions and SQL semantics.”
Algorithmic sharding on full primary keys degrades database query locality
“With every shard being on a side lead on a different row, sorry, every row being on a different shard, you end up needing to check all shards to answer this query, which kind of defies this prior, this criteria of locality that I talked about earlier.”
Chia: Google Spanner automatically merges shards when read traffic normalizes
“When the reload goes back to normal, We can then eventually remove these shard points that we added earlier, and this is a natural way of the system cleaning up itself so that we then shrink back the number of shards to reduce both unnecessary shards and also …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Daniel's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MADLEDGER | Senior Software Engineer, Google Spanner Grade Team Lead, Google Spanner Senior Software… | 1 | 15 | 78% 7/9 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |