> Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability.

This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't?

Separately, (emphasis mine):

> If you have a MySQL or PostgreSQL system that's bursting at the seams, or are struggling with hand-rolled transactions on top of an eventually-consistent database, Cloud Spanner could be the solution you're looking for. Visit the Cloud Spanner page to learn more and get started building applications on our next-generation database service.

From the rest of the article it seems like the wire protocol for accessing it is MySQL. I wonder if they mean to add a PostgreSQL compatibility layer at some point.

Why? Strong consistency isn't mutually exclusive with scalability. Google has written about it at length[1][2][3].

Furthermore, there are already more than a few attempts underway to build scalable relational databases ("NewSQL") outside Google.[4]

1: https://research.google.com/pubs/pub36971.html

2: https://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html

3: http://datascienceassn.org/sites/default/files/F1%20A%20Dist...

4: http://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2016/pavlo-newsql-sigmodrec2016....

First time I'm hearing about newSQL thanks for these links.

1 - https://www.cockroachlabs.com 2 - https://github.com/pingcap/tidb