How is F1 different from Megastore? [closed]

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Google uses its F1 RDBMS for its Ad Business. Google also has Megastore. My understanding is that they are both built on top of Bigtable. What is the technical justification for having both exist?

Google already offers Megastore on Google App Engine. Would it make sense to offer F1 on App Engine instead of Megastore if not for the existence of legacy use of Megastore?

Answer 1

MegaStore is the low-level storage system that Google uses. It is being replaced with a new system called Spanner (both being descendants of BigTable).

While Spanner was being developed, F1 was being created to act as the database system. This is meant to combine the scalability of BigTable with the usability of SQL databases.

To answer the question, F1 is different from MegaStore (now Spanner) in the way that a SQL database is different from the actual data storage system. I would imagine that Google will eventually offer F1 on the Google App Engine as Spanner replaces MegaStore.

Ref: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/38125.pdf