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Seems cool. But a lot of the things this blog gets excited over are better understood as features of Google’s platform that are available to and exploited by many of their systems. Eg disaggregated storage with append-only immutable files is just what Colossus does.

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The benefits of using googles internal tools isn’t what this paper is mainly about though. They do benefit from it but much more of the paper is explaining how extremely careful caching and having a deep control over the file format allows them to do things insanely fast.

Reading from colossus is only done if it misses the data cache and the data cache has a 90% hit rate. So in effect they’re getting in memory speeds instead of needing to always hit storage.

Otherwise there wouldnt be too much of a difference versus dremel.

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