Evolving clock sync for distributed databases

&gt; YugabyteDB is the first—and only—100% open-source, hybrid, multi-cloud, distributed SQL database on the planet.<p>It might be worth pointing out that HCL are patented by Cloudera in 2014 (with a provisional patent application filed in 2013) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freepatentsonline.com&#x2F;y2015&#x2F;0156262.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freepatentsonline.com&#x2F;y2015&#x2F;0156262.html</a><p>So while it is 100% open source, depending on your jurisdiction, you could be sued by Cloudera for patent infringement.<p>It is interesting, also how the referenced paper <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cse.buffalo.edu&#x2F;tech-reports&#x2F;2014-04.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cse.buffalo.edu&#x2F;tech-reports&#x2F;2014-04.pdf</a> is from 2014. Wonder if they knew about it each other? It doesn&#x27;t seem like the researchers from the paper are mentioned in the patent at all.

I find these articles (and there are dozens of them) somewhat frustrating because they fundamentally misrepresent the role of time sync in distributed databases like Spanner. Spanner doesn&#x27;t get <i>correctness</i> from tight synchronization, it gets <i>low latency</i> from that. Spanner&#x27;s <i>correctness</i> comes from estimating the clock error of cluster participants and evicting them when necessary. You can have the latter property without the former, and having the former property without the latter is useless.

Yugabyte ensures transactions consistency for a ACID model in a linear clock synchronization between nodes. Great article!

Oh joys, the sound of re-inventing the wheel. The old &quot;not invented here&quot; syndrome.<p>Per the blog, they state they want max 7ms difference between nodes.<p>I&#x27;m no timesync guru, but AFAIK can do that off-the-shelf today using chrony with hardware timestamping or PTP. No need to invent your own.<p>And if you still insist on doing something different, why not work on improving the existing work being done under the the Open Compute Time Appliance Project (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opencompute.org&#x2F;projects&#x2F;time-appliances-project-tap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opencompute.org&#x2F;projects&#x2F;time-appliances-project...</a>).