Google Research published at SIGMOD, 2012 and then published a paper about it at VLDB, 2013. Google used to use Sharded MySQL for their Ads system. But it had bad performance on availability, scalability and functionality. So Google decided to build a new database on Spanner to keep all RDBMS features but with scalability.
The **Spanner** provides a global timestamp order for the transactions to use. Thus **F1** can use timestamp to achieve concurrency control. **F1** actually gets three kinds of transaction control methods: 1. Snapshot transactions: which are read-only transactions and will read repeatable data using **Spanner** snapshot from some timestamp. 2. Pessimistic transactions: which directly use **Spanner**'s transaction and will require **F1** server to acquire and hold locks. 3. Optimistic transactions: which are like a **OCC** way that would do a confirmation in the final write phase and abort if found something updated. This kind of transactions would never acquire **Spanner** locks. And **F1** would use a column of lock to represent locks of different granularity.
F1 supports traditional relational data model. The *Cluster Hierarchical Model* would use repeated data (repeated ancestor's primary key) to store the data in a clustered way for fast joining process. The *Cluster Hierarchical Model* stores data like a tree with a root row, and then followed by its child rows and grand child rows.
F1 directly uses a separated Spanner table to store index information. F1 has two kinds of indices which are *Local Index* and *Global Index*. *Local Index* requires to require root primary key as a prefix so that the index can be used to locate the row in the same **Spanner Directory** fast. *Global Index* is a costly index which can locate the data globally without prefix.
F1 uses change history named *ChangeBatch* to maintain triggers and to log changes. Every transaction will have a *ChangeBatch* stored with root row that stores all changes of all children rows that belongs to it. The *ChangeBatch Table* can be queried to do trigger or update stuff by clients.
https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub41344
Google Inc
2013
Commercial
C++