What is Cloud Spanner?
Cloud Spanner is a flagship database service provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Cloud Spanner provides globally distributed relational database services. Cloud Spanner has the efficiently of Relational Database and flexibility of NoSQL databases. Along with vertical scaling like Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner can be scaled horizontally. Cloud Spanner is designed to scale horizontally across multiple regions without compromising in consistency. Overall, Cloud Spanner is the best option available for globally distributed applications with high throughput and low latency.
Following are the features of Cloud Spanner,
- Consistency: Cloud Spanner provides strong consistency to ensure that data remains consistent across distributed nodes even in there exist network partitions.
- Scalability: Cloud Spanner is highly scalable. It has flexibility like NoSQL databases. Cloud Spanner databases can be scaled vertically and horizontally.
- Support for SQL: Cloud Spanner supports standard SQL queries and relational database schemas. This helps developers to use Cloud Spanner with relational database systems.
- Global Distribution: Cloud Spanner enables data replication across multiple region and zones. This helps in providing high availability, high scalability, data recovery, etc.
Building Databases On GCP: Cloud SQL VS Cloud Spanner – Comparing Options
In today’s world when everything is available over the internet and more people are getting connected to the internet the amount of information or data is also increasing exponentially. Every application or service on the internet operates on data and is connected to some type of databases. Databases work as a backbone for application as data source and data sink. Google Cloud Platform being a prominent cloud provider, offers database services like Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner. Both are efficient relational database services provided by GCP. Though they provide similar services but are not the same. In this article we will be exploring about the differences between these database services by GCP which are Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner.