Keynote: Hardware Innovation for Zettabyte-scale Databases

Building on the simplicity and power of declarative queries combined with strongly consistent transactional semantics has allowed the Spanner database to scale to many thousands of machines running an aggregate of over 2 billion queries per second on over 8 exabytes of data. This includes some of the largest applications in the world, serving well over a billion users each. The appetite for database storage continues to grow, potentially reaching zettabyte scale (1 billion terrabytes) by 2030. However, the end of Moore and Dennard scaling mean that the cost of the infrastructure to run those databases could grow much faster than it has in the past. In this talk I will give my perspective on the challenges to reaching zettabyte scale, and the hardware technologies and approaches most (and least) likely to be successful.

• Data Management