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Comment by asim | Hacker News Reader

Technology behind spanner is incredible but unfortunately marketed horribly and positioned terribly. It was a solution built for large scale enterprise and no one else. It's not worth trying to sell this to developers. They're better off layering something else on top with a different brand and pricing model.

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its a solution built for google where they need to track ad budget burn down globally. Most enterprises dont have this problem, or the latency/performance/uptime requirements of google.

Then you've got a google proprietary API for what should be similar to Aurora with PostgreSQL wire compatibility.

Add in Google's history of deprecating and non-backwards compatible changes to SDKs.

That makes you wonder, who exactly Spanner IS geared towards.

Spanner is used extensively in google for all sorts of things.

Many companies have the uptime requirements, a decent number have the performance requirements, and it's all going in one direction. There are a lot of things Google need and then all of a sudden 10 years later lots of others need them too.

Google employees don't pay for spanner. This is the big difference. You might have quota but you don't actually pay any money for it. No one on the outside world wants to get ripped off for database usage.

Sure, the pricing seems off.

I thought it had a PostgresSQL dialect. It it too buggy/featureless?

https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/postgresql-interface

Neither, it's just not quite what folks expect. The postgres/spanner interface is about accessing SPANNER functionality via a PG interface. It's not about using Postgres with a Spanner back-end. That's all.

Bad marketing, bad pricing, bad positioning. It's crazy. Amazing technology.

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