http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/11/google-spanner-time/all/

The fascinating description of Google’s Spanner, arguably the single largest “known” database in the World leads me to wonder about the National Security Administration and the Defense Intelligence Agency, as much as Big Data and data mining.  Clearly, Spanner is a giant leap forward to a truly global database architecture that does not overload global network communication, and is essentially immune from replication latency or outages. The novel application of “time”  is probably the key element.  It also porttends further advances in massive data mining.  Andrew Fikes’ paper on Spanner essentially makes it available to the World, which if you carefully consider the point of the architecture, it makes sense… It also seems a bit spooky.