This was an interesting project at Google, it started when I was there, and it was breaking things when I left. It is too bad that Ken Thompson didn't get at least acknowledged for his role in making it happen.<p>I don't think it will be as influential as the original GFS was but its an important piece of work that folks should study.
I work on HBase (the Apache version of BigTable). It makes me sad to see how far ahead Google is compared to the rest of the world. :)<p>The notion of uncertain time is ingenious.
Interestingly, the data storage seems similar to Rich Hickey's Datomic: "data is versioned, and each version is automatically timestamped with its commit time; old versions of data are subject to configurable garbage-collection policies; and applications can read data at old timestamps."
I think the major contribution in this paper is how to do consistent snapshot reads in a distributed system without a common reference clock, i.e. the use of True Time.<p>Many databases use some sort of MVCC, but they operate on a single node or in a closely connected cluster. This paper shows how to achieve the same properties in a system spanning continents.
Another observation that struck me when I read this (and after reading the percolator and megastore papers) is how there is a convergence of the "traditional" relational DB world and the "new NoSQL" world.
Relational Databases are becoming more scalable, partially with new technology, partially by shedding features in some scenarios.
And the NoSQL stores, are becoming less so (it was really about "NoSQL" anyway, but that's a different story). All of these stores have layers or features that bring closer to the traditional SQL/relational model.<p>Spanner appears to strike a nice middle ground.
This looks like the High-Replicaiton datastore which is now the default in App Engine - Paxos replication, a choice between strong and eventual consistency and tablet sharding. Interesting that they've already built it and it's available for everyone to use.