Google (News - Alert) recently unveiled its latest innovation, a planet-spanning distributed database called Spanner. The company published information about Spanner recently in a research paper.

A complex system that relies on the aid of atomic clocks and GPS receivers, Google describes Spanner as "the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions." In other words, Google has created an information store which spans its fleet of many datacenters which span the globe. But the real feat is that applications are able to read data from this information store without high latencies.

Those involved in the Spanner project include Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, both of whom have been key figures in developing a number of Google's technologies, including MapReduce and GFS systems.

"Spanner is impressive work on one of the hardest distributed systems problems — a globally replicated database that supports externally consistent transactions within reasonable latency bounds," said Andy Gross, principal architect at Basho.

Applications that use Spanner are able to specify which datacenters contain certain bits of data, moving frequently used data to storage areas nearer to users, reducing write latency. The number of datacenters used to store the data can also be specified, adding or removing layers of redundancy as needed.

Spanner's magic comes from its TrueTime API, which depends on GPS receivers and atomic clocks installed in Google's datacenters to provide applications with accurate time readings locally without the need to sync globally.

Spanner still has its weaknesses, however, the most pressing being write times; the latency cost of geographically distributed write operations is still quite high with the system. Read times are still acceptable in such scenarios, though, making Spanner well suited to read-mostly Web workloads.

Currently, Google has moved only its F1 advertising platform to Spanner, with plans to migrate other apps in the future. In the meantime, Gmail, Picasa, Google Calendar, the Android (News - Alert) Market and other Google products will continue to rely on Megastore, Spanner's predecessor.

In related news, Google recently teamed up with Boingo to sponsor over 4,000 Wi-Fi locations free to all devices, except mobile Apple (News - Alert) products, which will last until the end of September.

The company also recently purchased Nik Software, the photography software company responsible for the Instagram-like Snapseed.

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