Highlights:

  • The announced update primarily centers on enhancing the database’s performance.
  • One of the key attractions of Cloud Spanner is its comprehensive suite of reliability features.

Recently, Google LLC released a new version of Cloud Spanner, one of its managed database services, allowing users to process information more quickly and affordably.

The update will be implemented by the company over the upcoming months.

Over ten years ago, Google created Cloud Spanner exclusively for internal use. The business started offering it via Google Cloud in 2017. Now, businesses use the database to store more data than 12 exabytes, or roughly 12 billion gigabytes.

Relational data arranged in rows and columns can be stored using Cloud Spanner. It can also store some other kinds of information, such as semistructured records. The latter data category includes files like collections of product descriptions and business documents.

The extensive set of reliability features that Cloud Spanner offers is one of its main selling points. The database complies with the ACID standard, so information is not lost in the event of technical problems like power outages and data write errors. Additionally, a Cloud Spanner deployment can be spread across various Google Cloud facilities to lessen the risk of a localized malfunction.

The recently announced update emphasizes speeding up the database’s performance. Google claims that Cloud Spanner now offers a 50% higher throughput than in the past at the same cost. Throughput is a performance metric that quantifies the volume of data applications can read and write per second.

Google claims that the increase in performance puts Cloud Spanner ahead of Amazon DynamoDB, a competitor database service provided by Amazon Web Services Inc. The tech giant states that Cloud Spanner now offers up to double the read throughput per dollar compared to DynamoDB for various workloads. The greater the read-throughput, the more swiftly applications can access data stored in their underlying databases.

Google released the speed boost two months after updating Cloud Spanner with another performance-enhancing feature. The Data Boost feature can be used to carry out computationally taxing tasks like executing analytics queries. According to Google, the ability to complete such tasks without consuming processing power from other workloads in a Cloud Spanner environment is made possible by Data Boost.

Google has recently announced an update that includes a storage capacity improvement for the database. Up to 4 terabytes of data can now be stored in a single Cloud Spanner instance. Google will increase that cap to 10 terabytes.

Google Cloud Executives Jagdeep Singh and Pritam Shah posted on a blog, “Even with the increased capacity, Spanner users still only pay for the storage they actually use.”

The throughput boost that the search giant announced recently for Cloud Spanner is already available in a few cloud regions. The improvement will be implemented more widely in the upcoming months, and the new 10-terabyte storage limit will also be enforced. According to Google, customers won’t need to modify their current Cloud Spanner environments or briefly take them offline to access the upgrades.